A Study On The Appreciation Of The Arctic In Arctic Dreams

Barry Lopez is one of the outstanding nature writers in the American literary history who won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1986 for his work Arctic Dreams:lmagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape.This book not only reveals the particular beauty of the Arctic but also explores how people of different knowledge backgrounds appreciate the Arctic.Lopez ponders on the differences between appreciation in Western and Inuit cultures and re-appreciates the Arctic in the cultural communication.Critiques on Arctic Dreams mainly focus on the mystery of the Arctic depicted by Barry Lopez and some on Lopez's ecological model.By drawing on the theories of ecological aesthetics,this paper respectively analyses the appreciation of the Arctic in Western and Eskimo cultures and demonstrates how Lopez in the cultural communication aesthetically appreciates the Arctic.Chapter one examines Western instrumentalist perception of the Arctic,involving the overwhelming influence of dualism and anthropocentrism and the role Western science plays in the appreciation.In Western culture,nature is considered as tame object without agency,surrendering to human beings,and this sort of view on nature leads to the casual interpretation of the Arctic,which means that Western appreciation of the Arctic relies on their imagination rather than close exploration.Under such circumstances,the Arctic appreciated by Westerners is bleak wilderness with only commercial and material values.What is worth noticing is that Western science to some degree reduces the tendency to impose meanings on nature and thus allows the uncovering of the true beauty of the Arctic,though it cannot totally eliminate the influence of the lack of ecological consciousness.Chapter two elaborates on the Inuit appreciation of the Arctic,the appreciation from the dwelling perspective,exploring the influence of ecological consciousness on the appreciation of nature and the demerits caused by a lack of scientific knowledge.The Arctic appreciated by Eskimos is animated and mysterious,totally different from that in the Western imagination.Eskimos hold ecological ethics absent in Western culture to the extent that they recognize the intimate relationship between nature and human beings and respect nature as a subject rather than an object.Among Eskimos,it is believed that the land can tell people information.In these cases,the Eskimo appreciation of the Arctic relies not on imagination but on their intimate communication with the land.They perceive the land through their sensory system and such perception constructs their understanding of the Arctic.Eskimos'way of appreciating nature is not perfect.Because of lacking scientific knowledge,their appreciation cannot break through time limit,which means that without scientific knowledge,they fail to recognize huge diachronic changes in the land.Chapter three goes further to consider Lopez's appreciation of the Arctic under the influence of such two different cultures.As a Westerner in contact with the Eskimo culture,Lopez learns from Eskimos to explore the land curiously and attentively and then resorts to scientific knowledge to deepen his appreciation.In this way,the Arctic appreciated by Lopez is not a particular metaphor but has many characteristics seen from different perspectives.For Lopez,the Arctic is an animated system with inherent worth if mainly seen from a systematic perspective;the Arctic is an harmonious unity with mystery if appreciated from an overall perspective,a more comprehensive perspective;the Arctic is a civilized entity with dynamic changes if seen from a century-crossing and global perspective,a perspective that involves the dimension of time.This thesis,by analyzing the merits and demerits of respectively the Western and Inuit ways of appreciation,demonstrates the function of Inuit ecological consciousness in the appreciation to closely explore the concrete beauty of the Arctic and the function of Western science to deepen human beings' understanding of the Arctic.Meanwhile,it inquires into Lopez's appreciation of the Arctic in the cultural communication.Lopez as a Western traveler in contact with Inuit culture,with the help of Western science and Inuit way of communicating with nature,re-appreciates the Arctic and reveals the fascination of the Arctic,the animated,harmonious and civilized land.