A valuable lesson I got from Daniels and Cosgrove’s, “Iconography and Landscape” is that “various humanistic disciplines” are necessary to formulate an interpretation that probes beyond just the surface. The essay includes a very rich sentence that contains the definition of what discovering a “deep meaning” is, “by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion – unconsciously qualified by one personality and condensed into one work”. That last part was especially interesting to me, it seems to convey the idea that, whether intentional or not, anything creatively produced contains some sort of message or reflection of the time period it was produced in.
Another snippet from the essay that I found to be very relevant was “the concept of symbolic form.. a study of changing modes of perceiving and representing space, not as mere ‘conventions’ (to be taken up or not at will) or as true or false beliefs, but.. as ‘symbolic forms’ which structured the world according to specific cultural demands”. This sounded to me much like the description of what American Studies is.