A theory of place in North American mountaineering

Abstract

This essay examines mountaineering narratives in the light of recent eco-critical scholarship to assert that their tales of intense awareness and connection reveal a more fundamental integration between human subject and natural object than our culture has imagined. North American climbing narratives show three primary modes of imagining nature: first, as an object to conquer; second, as a picturesque setting to admire; third, as the extension of a self whose identity is shaped by the interpenetration of the human and the natural. The third of these modes motivates my study because this interpretation offers a lived example of the type of human connection to the natural world philosophers theorize is possible, and ecologists insist is necessary.