which is itself, of course, a cultural product.' But he added that this doesn't mean that a behavior or response cannot be both learned and authentic at the same time.Īccording to Shaw, at least part of the reason we retreat into nature is for an 'antidote to the forces of modernity.' It is because of this that we seek an 'unmediated relationship' with nature, for if nature is not the 'refuge from the encroachments of modernity' we seek, then we are betrayed by the very thing we hoped would save us from ourselves.īut Shaw stayed positive on the subject: 'If (like Wordsworth's) your heart leaps up when you behold a rainbow in the sky, my advice is to let it leap without worrying about whether it's been taught to do so.' Shaw also quoted Bernard Williams' 'Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy': 'Virtually nothing in human beings is 'natural,' including the use of language. The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt, for example, suggests that though we may assume that a walk to Nevada Falls allows us to escape civilization and human culture, nothing could be further from the truth. Some writers have claimed that our experience of 'wilderness' today is nothing more than a 'product of civilization,' he said, and that our reactions have been passed down and propagated by 'Wordsworthian sentiments' and other equally vivid cultural schemas of natural beauty. The lecture was the first in the Cornell Plantations Fall Lecture Series a garden party followed in the Plantations. and Jane Torrence Harder Lecture, 'Is Nature Natural? A View From Britain,' before some 300 people in Warren Hall Auditorium.

Shaw delivered the 14th annual William H. Harry Shaw, professor of English, posited this analogy to explain our reactions to what he referred to as the 'natural sublime' in a lecture Sept. Is the act of falling in love made any less natural by the fact that it follows the cultural scripts laid out for us in movies and literature?

War On Critics by Theodore L. Shaw