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Title of Thesis Or Dissertation, Worded THE NATURE OF THE SECULAR: RELIGIOUS ORIENTATIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL THOUGHT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE by ROBERT ARNOLD ZANDSTRA A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2017 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Robert Arnold Zandstra Title: The Nature of the Secular: Religious Orientations and Environmental Thought in Nineteenth-Century American Literature This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: William Rossi Chairperson Gordon Sayre Core Member Karen Ford Core Member Michael Allan Institutional Representative and Sara D. Hodges Interim Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded September 2017 ii © 2017 Robert Arnold Zandstra iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Robert Zandstra Doctor of Philosophy Department of English September 2017 Title: The Nature of the Secular: Religious Orientations and Environmental Thought in Nineteenth-Century American Literature My dissertation argues that changes in the structures and orientations of religious thought, changes commonly understood as secularization, have provided the intellectual underpinnings for the modern exploitation and ongoing destruction of the non-human world, which extend to the underwriting the devaluing and dehumanization of marginalized groups such as Native Americans. My work makes visible the secular assumptions of ecocriticism, which tends to blame Christianity for environmental problems. It also unwittingly relies on state-legitimating constructions of religion, simplistic religious-secular binaries, and outdated, false narratives of secularization. I theorize an ecocriticism “with/out the secular” to analyze secularity in both “secular” and “religious” settings, using the category of “religious orientation,” a tacit, pre-theoretical commitment that directs ultimate trust, structures meaning as it coheres in everyday life, and shapes ontological, epistemological, ethical, and other theories. I examine how certain nineteenth-century authors, including Henry Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and Pequot minister William Apess, resisted this secularization within contemporaneous American culture and Christianity because of its epistemic devaluing of the natural world. Each of these authors has been read as an exemplar of secularization, iv but such interpretations reveal more about the secular commitments of literary critics than about the authors and their contexts. I show instead how modern religious constructions do not necessarily correlate with the deeper religious orientation of an author or the secularity or non-secularity of his or her arguments. Dickinson’s poetry and Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers challenge dogmatic conceptions of heaven and Sabbath that are structured dualistically so as to devalue everyday earthly life. Yet they do so in non-dualistic ways that accord with a biblically rooted religious orientation of creation-fall-redemption-consummation. Their struggles against the church were against the church’s acceptance of dominant secularist ideologies that are ultimately at odds with Christianity and sustainable lifeways. Similarly, William Apess’ environmental justice work as a Native Christian against institutions dominated by white nationalist ideology demonstrate the how dualistic structures of secularity legitimate racism in conjunction with an anthropocentric that devalue the natural world. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Robert Arnold Zandstra GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2017, University of Oregon Master of Arts, English, 2012, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, English & Interdisciplinary Studies in History of Religion (with Honors), 2009, Calvin College AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Nineteenth-Century American Literature Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature Religion and Secularity PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Instructor, English Department, University of Oregon, 2011-2017 Instructor, English Department, Northwest Christian University, 2014 & 2015 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Lilly Graduate Fellowship, Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, 2010-2013 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Too many teachers, friends, colleagues, scholars and loved ones have supported me in myriad ways along the path to finishing this dissertation to thank each by name, but I am profoundly grateful. In particular, I’m grateful to my committee members Bill Rossi, Gordon Sayre, Karen Ford, and Michael Allan for sharpening my writing and thinking and whose respective seminars “Thoreau and Secularization,” “Nineteenth-Century American Poetry,” “Theorizing Ecocriticism: The Pastoral in America” and “Early American Natural History Writing,” and “Secularism and its Critics” contributed to the initial shape of this project. I especially owe thanks to my advisor Bill Rossi, whose guidance has been both rigorous and generous, and my wife Hope, for all her love and support. SDG. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 30 II. RELIGIOUS ORIENTATIONS AND ECOCRITICISM WITH/OUT THE SECULAR..................................................................................................... 32 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 79 III. CREATIONAL CHRISTIANITY AND THE NATURE OF BEING NATIVE: WILLIAM APESS’ RESISTANCE TO RACIAL HEGEMONY, ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE, AND RELIGIOUS SECULARITY ............. 85 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 155 IV. THOREAU’S “NATURAL SABBATH”: A CREATIONAL CRITIQUE OF SECULARITY ....................................................................................................... 161 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 210 V. THE FACT THAT EARTH IS HEAVEN: EMILY DICKINSON’S NON-SECULAR RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION ................................................. 214 Notes ...................................................................................................................... 272 VI. EPILOGUE ............................................................................................................ 275 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 280 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Axis of Orthodoxy/Fold Versus Axis of Secularity/Flock .................................... 24 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION A number of the most important and canonical environmental writers in American literature grew up in Calvinist religious contexts but later distanced themselves from the faith they were raised in or from organized religion altogether: Henry D. Thoreau,1 John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and others.2 One might very well ask, is this pattern a mere coincidence? or due to some feature of American Calvinism? or reflective of a larger trend of secularization? For these writers, did nature replace God as an object of devotion, or did environmentalism replace the church?3 Or instead did their religious faith mature in such a way that it fell outside what certain forms of Christianity were able to recognize as legitimate? One purpose of this dissertation is to provide a comprehensive account of this pattern. This dissertation also reconciles two divergent ecocritical interpretations of this phenomenon. One longstanding and influential ecocritical commonplace, based on the Lynn White Thesis, finds Christianity, including American Christianity and the Calvinist churches within it, to be inhospitable to the kind of environmental work being done by the above authors. In his 1967 Science article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” White claims that Judeo-Christianity and its inherent anthropocentrism are ultimately to blame for the world’s ongoing ecological catastrophe. White’s most important insight was that the environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis in religion, and requires a religious solution, but perhaps the most influential ecocritical stance bolstered by his argument is that religion itself, both historically and theoretically, is the problem. 1 A more nuanced version of this strand of ecocriticism has been articulated by Lawrence Buell. In “Religion and the Environmental Imagination in American Literature,” he observes a “fundamental and intractable fissiparousness within U.S. religio-environmental aestheticism,” largely due to the diversity of environmental discourse within the American literary tradition (231). In other words, he finds that, when held together, the categories “religion” and “environment” tend to wobble apart under scrutiny. In his “Afterword” to a themed issue of Christianity & Literature on “Environmental Imagination,” Buell wonders whether it is “possible to hold without self- contradiction
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