Coming to terms with nature: American literature and the ecological imagination (Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, Mary Hunter Austin)

The dissertation examines the representation of the natural world in the nonfiction prose of Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and Mary Austin. I am particularly interested in how interrelational models of ecology give these writers a methodology to describe not just what Wendell Berry calls "the ungeneralizable particularity of place," but to (re)imagine their own lives in relation to the ecosystems they are observing. Each writer practices (or attempts to practice) what I characterize as a "linguistic ecology"---an imaginative act that can be equated with the object upon which it focuses. The theoretical model finds a form in Francis Ponge's concept of adequation. In "La Pratique de la litterature," Ponge argues that literary compositions can be created to "imitate the life of the objects in the external world. Imitate---that is to say that they should have at least an equal complexity and presence. An equal depth..." Each chapter tracks a writer's attempt to find this ideal: for Thoreau, the zenith is the melting sandbank passage in the "Spring" chapter from Walden (1854). For Burroughs it comes as an intimation of the sublime during his travels to the west coast with Roosevelt and John Muir. For Austin, these Wordsworthian "spots of time" are most often "recollected in tranquility," finding a form as she works to locate points of contact and confluence between the natural world of the desert southwest and the native American (mostly Paiute) cosmologies and cultural practices she apprenticed herself to during the first two decades of the twentieth century. I try and articulate a shift between an environmental aesthetic, in Pongean terms, and an environmental ethic, where the authors concern themselves explicitly with questions of audience. This "voice" sometimes takes the form of the Jeremiadic "cry" opposed to ecological degradation, and sometimes a more elegiac lament of the destruction of the biosphere. Aldo Leopold's notion of a "land ethic," discussed in A Sand County Almanac (1949), offers an interpretive "lens" with which to parse the dialectical movement between logos (as word, idea, conception) and ethos (as deed, action, obligation).