Özet:

An ecological thinker, Romantic prose writer, mountaineer, conservationist, and a man of diverse personas, John Muir is first and foremost remembered for his ardent love of the Yosemite Valley, his vigorous attempts at establishing Yosemite National Park and founding the renowned Sierra Club, and finally for his battle against damming the most precious Hetch Hetchy Valley. In the guidebook he wrote for travellers and walkers, The Yosemite (1912), Muir fashions a narrative in the mode of a Romantic ode on the sublime features of the wild scenery in his most beloved natural surrounding. While rigorously describing and cataloguing the diverse peculiarities of the Valley, such as the streams, waterfalls, rock formations, glaciers and the flora, he at the same time glorifies nature out of a profound reverence for the divine harmony which marks the landscape. However, his particular approach and use of metaphors demonstrate that he undermines the classical opposition between ‘the beautiful’ and ‘the sublime’ that lies at the core of the aesthetic philosophy of the eighteenth century. Hence, mainly informed by Immanuel Kant’s transcendental inquiries of the concept of the sublime, this paper aims to highlight Muir’s style of hiding the natural sublime beneath the beautiful and to analyze his way of invalidating the binary towards a neo-Platonic/Christian notion of natural sublimity

Anahtar Kelimeler: