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Ending Up and Landing Out in the Prairie
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Ending Up and Landing Out in the Prairie

Joni Kinsey
The Iowa review, Vol.30(3), pp.132-140
12/01/2000
DOI: 10.17077/0021-065X.5345
Appears in  Diamond Open Access
url
https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.5345View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Too, the spectacle of the solitary individual who walks the beach and faces the enormity of the ocean (the figure of a young, windswept Jack Kennedy comes to mind) is common to a number of cultures and has a long tradition in literature and the history of art. Native Americans historically seem to have regarded the great grasslands as something not separate from themselves, but for everyone else it seems, until the land was dramatically changed into the regularized landscape we have today, the hugeness of the prairies and their lack of regular landmarks distorted the relationships of parts to the whole, challenged notions of scale and proportion, and disoriented directions. Intensely visual and preconditioned to expect, even require, traditional scenery with which to construct images (trees, rocks, hills, etc.), they were at a loss for how to deal with such stark terrain. [...]modernism validated the prairie's minimalist offerings, they resorted to filling their views with whatever was available—wagons, animals, people—or else they avoided painting prairies altogether. The once seemingly endless grasslands are now transformed into a vast continental quilt of cities, interstate highways, farms, forests, and fields; and natural prairies remain only in relatively small enclaves that pockmark the once seamless expanse.
 19th century American Indians Grasses Grasslands Literary devices Narrative techniques Prairies

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