| This dissertation suggests the pragmatic consequences of 20th Century American nature writing. It draws heavily on concepts from ecology, in particular the ecotone—a fluid, productive boundary zone where two or more ecological systems interpenetrate—to identify representational techniques that distinguish nature writing from other forms of writing in that it consciously mediates relationships among writer, reader, and the physical world. It examines the work of John Muir, John C. Van Dyke, John Steinbeck, Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, John Haines, and Terry Tempest Williams, who repeatedly represent and theorize boundaries, both perceptual and aesthetic. At these boundaries experience is intensified, and the dissertation articulates how nature writers represent experience as ongoing ecological possibility, partly by resisting a split between subjective experience and nature-as-object. John Dewey's and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work helps to analyze the strategies nature writers use in their attempts to define concepts such as space, place, geology, marine biology, aesthetics, and inhabitation in ecological ways. Because it is impossible to stand outside of experience, one is always implicated in an ecology, and the ecological definition of experience these seven writers advocate functions as a pragmatic intervention into the social discourse regarding the role of human culture in the natural community. |
