The sublime and the spectator: Writing the landscape from Vernet to "Vineland".

Abstract

This thesis analyzes Denis Diderot's Salons, art-critical writings by Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, and aesthetic theory by Jean-Francois Lyotard to arrive at a theory of landscape as a narrative response to visual phenomena, with specific reference to landscape as a painterly genre and as a genre of narrative description. I examine Baudelaire's use of the urban landscape of his day in the Salons and Spleen de Paris, and Pynchon's use of the mediated and media-influenced postmodern landscape of northern California. The dissertation traces the lineage of Lyotard's thought back to Diderot, demonstrating for the first time a strong link between the philosophies of Lyotard and Diderot in their theories of spectatorship and the sublime. Diderot can be shown not only to anticipate Lyotard, but in ways to look beyond him, thus implying a critique of Lyotardian aesthetics. I read the section on Vernet in the Salon de 1767 as a precursor of Lyotard's "Scapeland" in its displacement of the reader/spectator and in its purposeful confusion of the categories of painting and viewer, of object and viewing or perceiving subject. A similar subversion of these categories takes place in the writing of Baudelaire, particularly in Le spleen de Paris and in his analysis of the tableaux parisiens of Charles Meryon. Whereas in Diderot the visual medium of painting acts as a springboard for a narrative gesture I am calling landscape, in Pynchon's Vineland film and television are the genres within a genre that produce this narrative effect. Where Diderot uses the language of the Burkean sublime, Vineland evokes the postmodern sublime as theorized by Jameson, where individuals face a vast world interconnected by technology and impossible to cognize by the individual experiencing subject. A reading of the phenomenology of Lyotard's Pompidou Center exhibition "Les Immateriaux" in the final chapter of my dissertation investigates the institution of the postmodern museum, again relating it back to the spatial practice of Diderot's Salons.