![]() Although the name still evokes the direction followed by the explorer’s gaze and the desire to give shape to the new land, these significations only point to aspirations the characters fail to fulfill. ![]() ![]() In Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House (1941), Horizon designates a generic small town in the dusty Prairies of the Great Depression. ![]() (Kroetsch “Defining” 211)ġ Implicit in the very analogy the first European explorers perceived between the ocean they had just crossed and the Great Plains they were entering (Kreisel 258), the horizon line has been recurring in Prairie writing as the constitutive trait of a landscape defined by its minimalism: “Here was the least common denominator of nature, the skeleton requirements simply of land and sky – Saskatchewan prairie.” (Mitchell 3) A genealogy of Prairie horizontality, and of the significations literature has vested in it, can thus be retraced from its inception in the early narratives of the British explorers to its constitution into a topos in the Prairie realism of the twentieth century. Facing the riddle of self, and community and horizon we carefully mumble our answers. ![]() Here on the prairies we are always trying to name or generalize about an incomplete or fractured text. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |