Landscape Rhetoricity: Narrative, Ecology, and Topographic Form

ABSTRACT: This essay expands concerns of rhetorical narrative theory and econarratology by attending to rhetorical agencies of nonhuman beings within emergent conditions of landscape. Through analysis of two site-specific art pieces—Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape and Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield: A Confrontation —it considers ways that interactions between humans, animals, plants, and other living beings produce situated networks of rhetorical engagement. In both sites, artists tell specific stories through affordances of landscape. These human narratives take advantage of and exist alongside various nonhuman rhetorical agencies, which are also shaped by affordances of landscape, though directed to different audiences for different purposes. From this ecological perspective, humans and nonhumans exist within rhetorical, multispecies communities that are shaped by and shape the affordances of topographic form. Rhetoricity and topographic form emerge simultaneously and cooperatively through interactive conditions of interspecies being. This understanding of landscape rhetoricity remains sensitive to radical openness in the rhetorical occasion, noting ways that ecological conditions shape and are shaped by rhetorical interaction.