Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
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University of Bath PHD Turning nature into essays the epistemological and poetic function of the nature essay Schroder, Simone Award date: 2017 Awarding institution: University of Bath Link to publication Alternative formats If you require this document in an alternative format, please contact: [email protected] General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 25. Sep. 2021 Turning Nature into Essays: The Epistemological and Poetic Function of the Nature Essay Simone Schröder A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Bath Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies November 2016 COPYRIGHT Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with the author. A copy of this thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recog- nise that its copyright rests with the author and that they must not copy it or use material from it except as permitted by law or with the consent of the author. This thesis may be made available for consultation within the University Library and may be photocopied or lent to other libraries for the purposes of consultation with effect from ……………………………………. (date) Signed on behalf of the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences …........................................ Table of Contents Acknowledgements Abstract Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 1. The Nature Essay and Genre .................................................................................... 14 1.1 Aspects of the Essay: Characteristics of Form and Function......................... 14 1.2 Ways of Knowing and Making Sense of Nature .............................................. 26 2. “The Butterfly Collector”: The Encyclopaedic-Scientific Episteme .................. 40 2.1 Aesthetics of Collecting and Connecting in Alexander von Humboldt’s Ideen zu einer Physiognomie der Gewächse and Ernst Jünger’s Subtile Jagden ........................................................................... 40 2.2 Measuring and Mapping Nature in the Nineteenth Century: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Alexander von Humboldt’s Über die Steppen und Wüsten, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo ........................................................ 65 2.3 Data Prose – Contemporary Nature Essay Writing: Eliot Weinberger’s Naked Mole-Rats, David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster and Andreas Martin Widmann’s Mind Gardens .................. 94 3. “Mother Nature’s Son”: The Metaphysical-Spiritual Episteme ........................ 115 3.1 Epiphanic Moments and Revelations: J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine and Kathleen Jamie’s Peregrines, Ospreys, Cranes ....................................................... 115 3.2 The Dying Animal: Unsettling Human-Insect Relations through Elegy and Irony in Virginia Woolf’s The Death of the Moth and Robert Musil’s Das Fliegenpapier .................................................................. 139 3.3 Tales of Transformation and Experience: Thoreau’s Walden and Andreas Maier and Christine Büchner’s Bullau. Versuch über Natur ................ 154 4. “Animal Farm”: The Ethical Episteme – Animal Ethics, Stories of Decay, and Writing Entangled Agencies ................................................ 178 Conclusion: Paradigm Shifts in the Nature Essay .................................................. 202 Bibliography Acknowledgements This dissertation began life in a course on the genre of the essay at the University of Mainz and has since crossed the channel. At the University of Bath it was continued and completed with the help of a series of supervision sessions over the course of approximately three years. While my thanks go to Dieter Lamping for providing valu- able advice during my time in Mainz, the research environment in England could not have been more supportive to the further development of this project and that is in great part owing to Axel Goodbody, Nina Parish, and Richard Kerridge as literary scholars and individuals. I could not have done it without their expertise, encourage- ment and engaging criticism for which I am truly grateful. Funding for this research project was generously provided by the German Heinrich Böll foundation, while a Graduate School Scholarship of the University of Bath took away the burden of having to pay English tuition fees. Again, I would like to thank my lead-supervisor, Axel Goodbody, for encouraging me to apply for funding and supporting me in every other possible matter. I am thankful for the privilege of hav- ing had three years at my disposal, in which I could focus mainly on my research. In this context, I should also like to thank my parents, Eva and Thomas Schröder, for their ongoing support, and likewise Jutta and Werner Widmann. Without a second base in the Rhine-Main area it would have been much more difficult to realise a PhD project that profited immensely from movements between the UK and the European continent. The fact that I was being allowed into the reading rooms of the British Library, the Senate House Library, and University College London Library, in addi- tion to the research facilities in Bath, while still having University of Mainz’s library at my disposal, generated a vibrant working environment. During my time as a PhD student, I have also profited from the opportunities to pre- sent my research at conferences and summer schools. Among them the 2013 Summer School of the Austrian Institut für Kulturwissenschaft (IFK) that was so kind as to invite me as a stipendiary; the 2014 Würzburg Summer School for Cultural and Liter- ary Animal Studies; the 2014 conference on ecological genres of the DFG-Netzwerk “Ethik und Ästhetik in literarischen Repräsentationen ökologischer Transformatio- nen” at the University of Bayreuth; the 2015 ASLE conference at the University of Idaho; the 2015 ASLE-UKI conference at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge; and the 2016 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Uni- versity of Calgary. Each of these gatherings provided me with valuable feedback and brought me into contact with other ecocritics and fellow literary scholars, some of which have now become friends. My thanks go to Alan Macpherson for reading a draft version of my chapter on J. A. Baker and Kathleen Jamie and to Benjamin Bühler and Dan Gorenstein for sharing their research on Ernst Jünger’s entomologi- cal writing with me. Both academic contexts, German and English, have inspired this book, but there are also traces in this thesis of many private conversations, more than I can count. Talk- ing with others about the nature essay, but also about literature in general and the place and meaning it can hold in one’s life encouraged me to pursue this research pro- ject in comparative literature. I should like to mention my conversations – some more recent than others – with Hannes Becker, Katharina Dorn, Judith Keller, Mary Kuhn, Jyl Millard, Jochen Raue, Denise Reimann, Kristina Sturm, Christiane Stutius-Ott, Ulrike Weymann, but most importantly with Martin Widmann who was during this project effectively a fourth supervisor, the best proof reader I can think of and, as always, much more than that. Abstract The topic of this doctoral thesis is the nature essay: a literary form that became wide- ly used in European literature around 1800 and continues to flourish in times of eco- logical crisis. Blending natural history discourse, essayistic thought patterns, personal anecdotes, and lyrical descriptions, nature essays are hybrid texts. Their authors have often been writers with a background in science. As interdiscursive agents they move swiftly between different knowledge formations. This equips them with a unique potential in the context of ecology. Essayistic narrators can grasp the interdisciplinary character of environmental issues because they have the ability to combine different types of knowledge. They can be encyclopaedic fact mongers, metaphysical ramblers and ethical counsellors. More often than not they are all of these in one person. Where nature essays have been taken into consideration so far they have mostly been discussed together with other nature-oriented nonfiction forms under the label ‘nature writing’. This study proposes a different approach in that it insists that the nature essay has to be understood as a literary form in its own right. It explores ca- nonical works of nature writing, such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, often for the first time as nature essays by discussing them alongside other typical examples of this genre tradition. In order to better understand the discursive impact of this form, I frame my dis- cussion in the context of ecocritical theory. This means