Nowhere in American Fiction: Cultural Representations of Wasteland, Wilderness, and No Man’s Land

Abstract

Serbian word nigdina is used to depict the concept of place that could be described as nowhere in English. It is a term that originally means some distant, unknown and undefined land. It is derived from the spatial adverbial determiner “nowhere” and is used as a categorical designation of physical space that includes expressions such as “wasteland”, “wilderness”, “no man’s land”, “no-man’s land”, “no-man’s land” and the like. It appears as a place or space without legal, ownership or cultural identity, most often without people, in American fiction, but one that holds the capacity to have a transformative effect on the people who find themselves in it. Its use connotes human absence in a physical and symbolic sense. This term has a symbolic transformative capacity to the extent that it can denote changes in human society, but also the internal change of people themselves. It is categorical opposition to the notion of human habitat, but it cannot exist without referring to that notion.