The World in Front of the Text: Landscape as Medium of Mutuality

Abstract

This article describes an approach to interpreting landscape derived from the work of Paul Ricoeur. It examines a photograph of signs erected by oil companies in North Dakota forbidding entry to a well site, using these signs as a starting point to explore a paradoxical feature of a geographic site-as-text, namely the way that such sites exist within the world but also as texts that produce a world of their own. In the play between these two worlds, the first ostensive, the second not, landscape opens up a relational space of mutuality where imagination plays a central role.