The Poetics and Politics of Liminality: New Transcendentalism in Contemporary American Women’S Writing
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The Poetics and Politics of Liminality: New Transcendentalism in Contemporary American Women’s Writing by Teresa O’Rourke A Doctoral Thesis Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University 21st June 2017 © by Teresa O’Rourke 2017 ABSTRACT By setting the writings of Etel Adnan, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson and Rebecca Solnit into dialogue with those of the New England Transcendentalists, this thesis proposes a New Transcendentalism that both reinvigorates and reimagines Transcendentalist thought for our increasingly intersectional and deterritorialized contemporary context. Drawing on key re-readings by Stanley Cavell, George Kateb and Branka Arsić, the project contributes towards the twenty-first-century shift in Transcendentalist scholarship which seeks to challenge the popular image of New England Transcendentalism as uncompromisingly individualist, abstract and ultimately the preserve of white male privilege. Moreover, in its identification and examination of an interrelated poetics and politics of liminality across these old and new Transcendentalist writings, the project also extends the scope of a more recent strain of Transcendentalist scholarship which emphasises the dialogical underpinnings of the nineteenth-century movement. The project comprises three central chapters, each of which situates New Transcendentalism within a series of vertical and lateral dialogues. The trajectory of my chapters follows the logic of Emerson’s ‘ever-widening circles’, in that each takes a wider critical lens through which to explore the dialogical relationship between my four writers and the New England Transcendentalists. In Chapter 1 the focus is upon anthropological theories of liminality; in Chapter 2 upon feminist interventions within psychoanalysis; and in Chapter 3 upon the revisionary work of Post-West criticism. In keeping with the dialogical analogies that inform this project throughout, the relationship examined within this thesis between Adnan, Dillard, Robinson and Solnit and the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists is understood as itself reciprocal, in that it not only demonstrates how my four contemporary writers may be read productively in the light of their New England forebears, but also how those readings in turn invite us to reconsider our understanding of those earlier thinkers. CONTENTS Acknowledgments………..…………………………………………………………………...3 Introduction...…………………………………………………………………………….......5 Chapter 1: ‘To present as much transitional surface as possible’: New Transcendentalism and the Poetics of Liminality………….…....................................................................44 Between Transition and Liminality: A Question of Terminology…………………...46 ‘Glad to the brink of fear’: Liminal Nature in New England Transcendentalism…...50 ‘The gaps are the thing’: Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)………………………………………………………………………………...57 ‘Lingering between the known and the unknown’: Etel Adnan’s Journey to Mt. Tamalpais (1986) and Sea and Fog (2012)……………………………………………… ……..74 ‘The blue of distance’: Rebecca Solnit’s Blue World………………………………..87 ‘A rupture in the conversation’: Dialogical Tactics in Gilead (2004) and Home (2008)………………………………………………………………………………...100 Chapter 2: ‘What if the object started to speak?’: Situating New Transcendentalism in the Intersubjective Space Between .…………………………………………….......................115 ‘An innavigable sea washes silently between us’: Emerson’s Self-Reliant Intersubjective……………………………………………………………………….117 Looking back, moving forward: Irigaray’s and Benjamin’s Redemptive Critiques……………………………………………………………………...……..121 Coping with Contradiction: The Creation of a New Poetics?.................................................................................…………………..........128 1 ‘A riddle I had to decipher’: Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby (2013) ……...…………………..……………………………………………………….......136 Modelling Intersubjectivity I: Jessica Benjamin’s ‘potential space of thirdness’…..145 ‘It was as if I was her shadow’: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980)..........147 Modelling Intersubjectivity II: Diotima’s Dialectic………………………………...162 ‘A woman and a man, both simplified and enlarged’: Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees (2007)….……………………………………………………………………………169 Chapter 3: ‘We go westward as into the future’: The Shifting Geographies of New Transcendentalism………………………………………………………………………….184 ‘Vague and impersonal’: New England Transcendentalism in the American West....189 From New England to the New West……………………………………….............195 ‘Sometimes around here it gets almighty western’: Annie Dillard’s The Living (1992)……………………………………………………………………….............198 ‘The orphan child of a brilliant century’: Marilynne Robinson’s Lila (2014)……………………………………………………………………………….210 ‘I hadn’t realised that the end of the world could be a place as well as a time’: Rebecca Solnit in the New Transcendentalist West………………..………………………...219 ‘My two true homes’: Etel Adnan’s Eastern Roots and Western Routes………... ..231 Can this Last Place Last?...........................................................................................242 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….....244 Bibliography………………..……………………………………………………….….......252 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I must extend my sincerest thanks to my supervisory team, Dr Jennifer Cooke and Dr Andrew Dix. Your intellectual, practical and emotional support has been immeasurable, and has kept me going in the moments when I felt the project may forever remain in its own state of perpetual becoming. Thank you to Loughborough University’s School of the Arts, English and Drama, and also Loughborough Graduate School for providing the financial support that made this project possible. Thank you to my review panel members, Dr Mary Brewer, Dr Brian Jarvis and Dr Paul Jenner who reviewed samples of my work in the early stages and helped to shape my preliminary thinking. To all the staff in the School of the Arts, English and Drama: Dr Kerry Featherstone, Dr Anne-Marie Beller, Dr Nick Freeman, Dr Carol Bolton, Professor Elaine Hobby, and so many others, I am extremely grateful for the encouragement and kindness I have received over the years. Beyond the thesis, thank you to Dr Arianna Maiorani and Professor Chris Christie who provided guidance and advice during my early forays into undergraduate teaching, and to those I have taught for helping me developing my teaching skills. Thanks also to my friends and colleagues at Pilkington Library for their support and encouragement throughout the process. A huge thank you to the many wonderful friends I have met throughout my time at Loughborough. A particularly loud thank you to Jennifer Nicol, Jenna Townend, Sophie- Louise Hyde, Michael ‘Gary’ Gilmour, Leigh Harrington, Tosha Taylor and Will Retry: I couldn’t have asked for a more inspiring, hilarious and downright ridiculous group of humans to complete this process alongside. Thanks also to Doug Stark, with whom I have shared so much food for thought in recent years, and to whom I wish all the best in his own PhD studies over in the U.S. Thanks to all residents of the PGR room past and present for creating such a welcoming (if at times rather raucous) studying environment. 3 To Dan, while our lives have now taken different paths, I remain thankful and grateful for the years we spent together, and for your support and grounding which saw me through the hardest times of this project. To my parents, Tom and Lesley, I owe you so much more than gratitude. I simply could not have done this without your unwavering love and encouragement. To have you both behind me throughout the highs and lows of this process has been utterly invaluable. You inspire me more than you know. Finally, I would like to dedicate this project to my grandfather, Walter Yon, a Saint who went marching in during the first days of this journey, whose life was a study in perseverance from the beginning. This is for you, Pops. 4 INTRODUCTION In April 2015, I found myself in a government building on Market Street, San Francisco, sharing a lift with Rebecca Solnit. I introduced myself – having just listened to her forcefully address a board of officials regarding what she saw as their tardy and ineffectual environmental policies – and explained that she was the focus of my doctoral thesis, alongside Etel Adnan, Annie Dillard, and Marilynne Robinson. How, Solnit asked, did I intend to bring together such a disparate group of thinkers? We walked through the market, Solnit on the lookout for the fresh cherries that were just then becoming available, and I explained that my premise was to examine the influence of New England Transcendentalism on their writings. We chatted briefly about Thoreau and Eadweard Muybridge before parting ways – me to a conference, and Solnit to the library where she was working on her latest book. While only a very short conversation, Solnit’s initial reaction to being aligned with Adnan, Dillard and Robinson was particularly fitting, given Laura Maria Child’s response when asked to define Transcendentalism in 1844: ‘It is a question difficult, nay, impossible to answer; for the minds so classified are incongruous individuals.’1 Many have acknowledged the elusive nature of the nineteenth-century movement, as was most concisely expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s close friend, Almira Burrows, who famously described Transcendentalism as ‘A little beyond’.2 Contemporary critics have been inclined to agree, with Joel