Linda Hogan and Annie Dillard Bachelor’S Diploma Thesis

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Markéta Tomášková Searching for Home on This Earth: Linda Hogan and Annie Dillard Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph. D. 2016 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature - 2 - Acknowledgement I am very grateful to my supervisor Dr. Martina Horáková for her guidance, kind support, and valuable comments on the manuscript. I would also like to thank my family, including Riki the dog, for providing me with a cosy and warm dwelling, which made the writing and the completion of this paper possible. - 3 - Searching for Home on This Earth: Linda Hogan and Annie Dillard Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................- 5 - 1 The Perception of ‘Objects’ ............................................................................................- 9 - 1.1 ‘Objects’ in Dwellings ............................................................................................. - 14 - 1.2 ‘Objects’ in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ....................................................................... - 18 - 2 The Perception of Animals ..............................................................................................- 24 - 2.1 Animals in Dwellings .............................................................................................. - 29 - 2.2 Animals in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek ........................................................................ - 36 - 3 The Feeling of At-homeness in Dillard’s and Hogan’s Texts .........................................- 48 - Conclusion ............................................................................................................................- 61 - Works Cited ..........................................................................................................................- 64 - Résumé .................................................................................................................................- 66 - Resumé .................................................................................................................................- 67 - - 4 - Introduction The present study explores the field of nature writing, a field which could be characterized by “awakening of perception to an ecological way of seeing” (Lyon x); nature is thus seen as a network of relations that create communities, as grounded in “patterns [which] radiate outward to include the human observer” (Lyon x). Nature writing as a genre then seems to be as manifold and its diverse tendencies as intertwined as the natural world it is concerned with, while the authors who cultivate it might be also perceived to form certain “communities” and their writing to “radiate outward” to reach to the reader and pull him/her into “[the] realm of complexly interwoven relationships” (Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous 85), into the landscape shared with “the other presences that surround and influence our daily life” (Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous 7). Conveniently enough, Thomas J. Lyon provides those who are on the verge of losing themselves in or are already overwhelmed by the colours and smells of this rich field with “A Taxonomy of Nature Writing” that could make a helpful companion on their expedition. Lyon identifies in the chapter, in his small field guide, three principal traits of nature writing as such, namely “natural history information, personal responses to nature, and philosophical interpretation of nature” (20) while “[t]he relative weight or interplay of these three aspects determines all the permutations and categories within the field” (20). His overview ranges from specimen which show only occasional “personal or philosophical or literary” passages and the content is thus mostly of an informative character, as it is the case with “a professional paper or a field guide or a handbook” (20), through “natural history essays” which represent a marriage of “expository descriptions of nature” and “a literary design so that the facts then give rise to some sort of meaning or interpretation” to “rambles” which Lyon describes as “a classic American nature writing form, [where] natural history and the author’s presence are more or less perfectly balanced” (21). The ‘rambler’ undertakes - 5 - walks in the vicinity of his or her home, of his or her “home ground”, loved and cherished, and describes the events and encounters as “observer-participant” (Lyon 21, 23). The more to the right of Lyon’s spectrum (22), the more is the author present in the writing and the personal experience in or with the natural world begins to prevail over the expositions of natural history (23); “Rambles” are therefore followed by three species of “the nature experience essay”, “Solitude and Back-Country Living”, “Travel and Adventure”, and “Farm Life” respectively. As these three categories are not relevant for the focus of the thesis, they just serve as a bridge to the other end of the scale which features the category designated as “Man’s Role in Nature”. These are in their essence philosophical works whose authors employ their experiences and accounts of natural history to pave way for the findings and thoughts they want to share (Lyon 25). This thesis focuses on two representatives of American nature writing: Annie Dillard and Linda Hogan, more particularly on their nonfiction works or collections of essays Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Dwellings respectively. Lyon classifies Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as an example of the category “Rambles” and, though he does not state to which part of the spectrum Linda Hogan belongs, she seems to fit best to the area of “Man’s Role in Nature”, except for her writing is far from being “abstract and scholarly” (Lyon 25). This thesis seeks to study in detail the possible ways of perception, understanding, and interpretation of the natural world and of its many voices, smells, and textures, within the field of nature writing. The choice of the texts by Annie Dillard and Linda Hogan was not, however, inspired by the categorization and by what the distinct categories may imply; the inspiration has grown from their close neighbourhood in the anthology At Home on This Earth: Two Centuries of U.S. Women’s Nature Writing, where they are presented as unified by a common interest for nature but in fact manifest a diversity of approaches and attitudes. In the introduction to the above-mentioned anthology, Lorraine Anderson provides a short account of the history of women’s nature writing and of the changes its position has - 6 - undergone in the wider context of literature and in relation to the literary canon since the beginnings of the genre in the middle of the nineteenth century (2-5). Since women were confined to the households and their surroundings by the character of the role society had ascribed to them (Anderson 3), their writing tends to be more “home-based” than that of their male counterparts and “the word home comes up often in women’s nature writing” (Anderson 5, original emphasis). This tendency represented almost till the end of the twentieth century a hindrance in the women’s nature writing being included into and regarded as a part of the literary canon (Anderson 3-4) as they did not produce “the kind of nature writing that this culture has recognized as such” (Anderson 3). At the same time, the historical and social circumstances gave rise to an interesting and very important phenomenon: perceiving the natural world as home. Anderson draws attention to the fact that “many women nature writers have found freedom from the domestic sphere and all that it traditionally entails by finding a home in nature” and “have embued the concept of home with new meaning by expanding it to encompass the wider world” (Anderson 5). The broadening of the idea of home as to cover “the wider world” or the world in its entirety right away could be viewed as an essential ingredient in our desire to protect it. It is the emotional ties of the feeling of at-homeness, the feeling of safety, cosiness, and belonging, that make us treat the (natural) world with care. The thesis aims to provide a comparative analysis of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard and Dwellings by Linda Hogan, searching in particular for the feeling of at- homeness in the worlds these two works create. It strives to investigate the distinct ways the two authors perceive nature and how they translate into the texts of their essays. Although they belong to the same generation (Dillard born 1945, Hogan 1947), they started to publish their works in different decades, Dillard in 1970s (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974) and Hogan in 1990s (Dwellings in 1995), which may have shaped the principles on which the worlds are built, as well as their ethnicity (Hogan is of a Chickasaw origin). It is not the objective of the analysis, however, to map possible correlations between these contextual - 7 - factors and the specificity of their texts, and it would have even been implausible in a case study of two authors and two works. Instead, the focus is on the variability of roles nature could play in the texts by writers often classified as nature writers. One of the most prominent contemporary experts on the roles nature plays and has played (not only)

Load more