| Modern eco-critical theory often posits that the ways in which we tend to write about Nature as a construct reflect more about our own cultural and temporal reflections of Nature than the natural world as it is. Many eco-critical theorists have turned to deconstruction and materialist theory to critique the ways in which the genre reifies Nature as a construct. The problem of reification through language also troubled medieval religious writers in the West. Apophasis, a form of writing that constantly critiques and sublimates its own statements about Divinity, established an alternative method through which writers could textualize Divine encounter. Since the genre of nature writing is not religious per se, the work of 20th century biologist Jakob von Uexkull offers a paradigm for mundane (as in rooted in the mundus) hiddenness, encounter, and revelation -- the Umwelt. Uexkull's Umwelt conceptualizes a "bubble", limited by perceptive complexity and specialized ability of each species to read its environment. Within this system, each species constitutes a subject in dynamic conversation with the phenomenal world, but each species is also limited to fully perceive that totality of natural phenomena. This biological interactive dynamic allows for subject and object, observer and observed break-down that often mimics the practices of more traditionally religious texts in the apophatic mystical religious tradition. This dissertation studies how texts within the medieval religious, Classical Chinese mountains and rivers poetry of Wang Wei, and 20th century Anglo-American nature writing by Gary Snyder and Joe Hutto reveal apophatic moments through their use of natural imagery. These apophatic moments allow for these texts to momentarily escape from the problem of textualization, signaling an encounter with the non-anthropocentric other that escapes reification. |
