Romantic Mythologies of ‘Naturality’ and the Construction of the Excursionary Gaze

According to Roland Barthes, mythologies are «words encrusted of history» soon de-historicised as to become images and frozen by habit and ideology which protect them from critical revision. First to be processed and transformed by powerful cultural drives is the image of nature – the ‘other’ space par excellence of the natural space, enacting an unprecedented discursive offensive. From the aristocratic invention of the landscape garden to the bourgeois myth of the country-village, to the tourist gaze, nature’s invoked ‘naturality’ is constructed criss-crossing a number of gazes and rhetorical machines, of cultural and aesthetic tropes bound to resist still today. Poetry will give voice to this traumatic epic, narrating and denouncing and yet enhancing symbolic reparations and sutures.