Styles of the wild.
Item
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Title
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Styles of the wild.
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Identifier
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AAI9969683
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identifier
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9969683
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Creator
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Cochran, Stuart.
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Contributor
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Adviser: William P. Kelly
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Date
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2000
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Language, Rhetoric and Composition | American Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation is both a literary and cultural study of the wild---in American nature writing, popular culture, and theory---which examines the various, often contradictory, constructions and uses of this term. It traces the contemporary proliferation of the wild as a key signifier to a seminal tropological shift from wilderness to wild that Henry David Thoreau enacts in his essay "Walking" (1862), when he writes: "The West of which I speak is but another name for the WiId; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World." The shift begun by Thoreau is completed In Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild (1990), when he writes: "Wildness is not just the 'preservation of the world,' it is the world." As caims are signs comprised of stones, nature and nature writing are signs composed of facts. After tracking the prominence of "facts" in nature writing to the influence of natural history and Transcendentalism, this study concludes that nature writing itself is a semiotic practice, and that Peircean semiotic is a more coherent basis for ecocriticism than poststructuralism (with its implicit Saussurean idealism of the dyadic sign model that excludes any referent). Framed by Thoreau and Snyder, the study focuses on William Bertram's proto-ecological stance in the Travels (1791) blending the voices of natural history, sublimity, and Quaker benignity; Barry Lopez' rhetorics of natural and personal history in Arctic Dreams (1986) balancing the metaphors of quantum physics and the Eskimo hunter to redefine a competent description of the land by reinscribing its mysteries; Terry Tempest Williams' "erotics of place" in Desert Quartet (1995); and Snyder's poetic deep ecology. It also considers recent research (in systems thinking, complexity/chaos, environmental activism, ecofeminism and ecopsychology) relevant to the wild, and concludes that the virtual field of their interconnections comprises "wild theory" or wildness studies.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
