<p>  </p> <p>The garden and garden like spaces are ubiquitous in the Romantic narrative and my argument engages the (neo)colonial politics involved in their creation and maintenance within and outside of the Spanish Empire: the majestic and creole garden of Colombia and Cuba, the enslaved subsistence plot or <em>conuco </em>in Cuba, and the sacred, indigenous garden of Mexico, through writers such as Jorge Isaacs, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Anselmo Suárez y Romero, Cirilo Villaverde, and Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, amongst others. I address how these garden spaces exist within and alongside of what I term the garden state: the transformation and domestication of nature through agriculture and horticulture. This is an imperial and neo-imperial environmental aesthetic that emerges in response to the rise of liberal agro-economic policies in the light of industrialization, the entrance of the West into ‘modernity,’ and the proliferation of the <em>hacienda </em>and <em>ingenio</em>. It is with the garden’s function as descriptor for nation and as discrete, enclosed space for the cultivation of nature that I engage with its capacity to mediate the politics of belonging and civilization in Romantic literature and mid-century cultural and political discourse. Traditionally read, the Romantic narrative centers around erotic productivity, through romantic couplings as a measure for the success or failure of the family. Parallel to this erotic drive, the garden state introduces a narrative of economic productivity that the presence of the garden, its creation, maintenance, and decline interrupts. The failure of the garden state parallels not only that of erotic productivity in the narratives, but rather it brings to the fore the fundamental contradictions of the civilizing project. These narratives are predicated on the continued exclusion of those exploited and displaced under the Spanish Empire—namely Indigenous Peoples, the enslaved, and women. However, as I develop a politics of belonging and labor, I posit that these same narratives complicate exclusionary politics through the environmental emplacement of their marginalized protagonists. As such their subsequent deaths or further displacement undermine the very places they were to uphold, causing the gardens’ destruction. I analyze the interaction of the politics of race and gender within the garden and garden state through death, labor, desire, and secularization to highlight the complexity of “civilization,” offering novel readings on how nature aides in questioning the broader limits of the nation in nineteenth-century Latin America and the waning Spanish Empire. </p>

Cette recherche s’intéresse à l’interrelation entre l’expérience de l’art public et celle du paysage. Elle se penche sur l’art public utilitaire, plus précisément sur le cas de quatre œuvres-banc situées dans le Parc linéaire de la rivière Saint-Charles, à Québec. La position assise suggérée par ces productions artistiques occasionne un contact sensoriel direct avec l’œuvre, mais surtout, elle orchestre un retournement du regard vers le paysage selon une posture et un angle de vue définis. L’activation de la fonction de banc par l’action de s’y asseoir, ou du moins la compréhension de cette possibilité d’usage, donne alors accès à une expérience du paysage environnant qui, loin d’être fortuite, fait partie intégrante de l’œuvre-banc. Cette étude analyse ainsi les œuvres-banc afin de mieux comprendre comment elles sont reçues par le public, mais également comment elles participent à l’expérience paysagère. Les réponses obtenues à la suite d’un questionnaire en ligne ont permis d’évaluer les différents aspects de la compréhension et de l’exploration de la fonction de banc des œuvres, selon une grille d’analyse conçue en adaptant certains postulats de la théorie des affordances de Gibson (1979; 2014), de la matrice de préférences de Kaplan & Kaplan (1989a, 1989b) et du modèle environnemental de Carlson (1979) aux enjeux de la recherche. Les données cumulées et traitées ont ensuite permis de démontrer que les œuvres-banc participent à une expérience paysagère de qualité. Cette contribution est principalement liée à la position assise suggérée par l’œuvre, elle qui invite les usagers du parc à s’immerger dans la scène tout en offrant une perception multisensorielle du paysage. En somme, cette recherche a fait émerger des constats sur l’apport des œuvres d’art à l’aménagement de l’espace public et à la qualité de l’expérience vécue par les citadins, deux volets sous-explorés de la recherche en art public. / This research questions the relationship between the experience of public art and that of the landscape. It focuses on utilitarian public art, more specifically on the case of four artistic benches located in the Saint-Charles River Linear Park, in Quebec City. The seated position suggested by these artistic productions causes direct sensory contact with the work, but above all, it orchestrates a reversal of the gaze towards the landscape according to a defined posture and angle of view. The activation of the bench function by the action of sitting on it, or at least the understanding of this possibility of use, then gives access to an experience of the surrounding landscape which, far from being fortuitous, is an essential aiming of the artistic bench. This study thus analyzes artistic benches in order to better understand how they are received by the public, but also how they participate to the landscape experience. The answers obtained following an online questionnaire allowed to evaluate the different aspects of under-standing and exploring the bench function in the art piece. An analysis grid was designed by adapting certain postulates of Gibson's affordance theory (1979; 2014), Kaplan & Kaplan's preference matrix (1989a, 1989b) and Carlson's environmental model (1979). The data ana-lyzed according to this grid then made it possible to demonstrate that the artistic benches contribute to a quality landscape experience. This contribution is mainly linked to the seated position suggested by the work, which invites park users to immerse themselves in the scene while offering a multisensory perception of the landscape.

<p>Building on concepts of the pastoral, the picturesque, the “vernacular ruin,” and frontierism in an American context, this thesis explores the interest in ruin and commodity-oriented refuse within rural, wilderness, and what Leo Marx in <em>The Machine in the Garden</em> calls “middle ground” environments. Chapter one analyzes how “nature” has been conceptualized as a place where human-made objects become repurposed through the gaze of the spectator. Theories surrounding gallery and exhibition space, as well as archaeological practices related to garbage excavation, are assessed to determine how waste objects, when wrested out of context, become artifacts of cultural significance. Chapter two turns to focus on the settler experience of the frontier in order to locate a uniquely American evolution of the interest in everyday waste objects. Chapters three and four return to the rural and the pastoral to focus on Marx’s concept of the “middle ground.” In dialogue with Marx’s theories, I propose a definition of the “neopastoral” as that which evolves from the interjection of domestic waste into these middle spaces to the aesthetic appropriation of everyday, common objects in modernist American poetry. The final chapter focuses on selected poems by modernist writers such as Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and W.C. Williams to analyze their explicit references to everyday waste in conjunction with the mythologized American pastoral. These poets provide evidence for how the drive to poeticize an abandoned, human-made object’s proximity to a natural environment plays a significant role in the perception of the fragmented object-subject relationship in modernity.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)