Reading Landscape in American Literature: The Outside in the Fic ...

out to describe or produce a landscape of estrangement the way that s/he sets out to develop a character or set a scene. That there are landscapes in literature has nothing explicit to do with a landscape of estrangement. In other words, in order to read a landscape of estrangement, the text need not provide a readable landscape that is, in turn, “viewed.”

With that said, however, one will find landscapes of estrangement emerging from various other, more familiar landscapes, whether geographic, architectural, sonic, and so forth. In other words, a landscape of estrangement does not occur in a vacuum but has a relation to more readily readable landscapes; this relation, however, must be worked through for each occasion. For example, near the end of Running Dog, when Glen Selvy is in the desert, waiting to die from stabbing, he has an experience of the Outside within a physical landscape, resulting in the emergence of a landscape of estrangement:

The reader can imagine this desert scene as a physical landscape, but the undecidability of space and time—one might say the rub between landscape that is locatable and not locatable—contributes to the production of a landscape of estrangement. If my development here reeks too much of negative theology, this simply has to do with the need to make a clean break between the idea of a landscape and any representational strategy. This must be very clear: Any given literary text does not represent a landscape of estrangement, even if a landscape of estrangement emerges within that text.

Following Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, a concept is a pure event, and as such it operates in an autoreferential manner. In other