W. S. Merwin and the postmodern environment

In this dissertation, I reappraise the writings of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W. S. Merwin (b. 1927) with the revisionary purpose of elucidating Merwin's work as an ecologically informed, nature-engaged critique of Western anthropocentrism. I maintain that Merwin, who cultivates in his writing a profound appreciation of the essential biologicality of the human condition, a humility before other-than-human living beings, and an urgent awareness of the exterminative threat irruptive humanity poses to the ever-diminishing biodiversity of the natural world, challenges prevailing Western cultural and literary traditions which hold as their central tenet the categorical exaltation of human beings, interhuman relationships, human perspectives, human productions and human interests. I argue that Merwin's critics over the past three decades, modernist and postmodernist alike, have proposed interpretive constructions of Merwin's work which strategically mystify Merwin's literary problematization of anthropocentrism and which systematically efface Merwin's ecological and environmental concerns. Most specifically, I dispute the critical consignment of Merwin's writing to the tradition of Whitmanian humanism, and situate Merwin's work instead in an indigenous American tradition of nature writing that commends Henry David Thoreau as its literary exemplar and principal theoretical exponent. While this study proceeds within the anthropocentrically secured realm of postmodern literary criticism, I intend my work as a gesture toward the development of a theoretical methodology to sustain a reorientation of literary studies away from an increasingly reductive and sterile anthropocentrism and toward the ecologically rational, reciprocal engagement with the natural environment that is exigent for the maintenance of biological life--including human life--on the planet.