Dramas of solitude: Narratives of retreat in American nature writing.

This study of American nature writing examines narratives relating the writer's movement away from society toward a state of solitude in nature--what are called narratives of retreat. The study applies narrative theory to this branch of literary nonfiction. In a theoretical opening chapter, the narrative of retreat is defined and elaborated as a genre, and its relations to questions of the ethical import and interest of narrative are explored. The second, third, and fourth chapters examine retreat narratives from different eras that nonetheless evince resemblances in formal trajectories. Chapter Two analyzes Henry D. Thoreau's Ktaadn, from The Maine Woods (1864). The essay enacts a formal paradigm underlain by a narrative logic of retreat, which dictates that the proper outcome to a story about losing the human is recognition of an essentially nonhuman state. Evidence from drafts demonstrates how Thoreau devised climactic passages to fulfill this narrative imperative. Chapter Three concerns the opening narrative to The Desert (1901) by John C. Van Dyke. Attention is paid to ways the author displaces signs of his own subjectivity in his attention to his nonhuman subject. Analysis of the narrative reveals discontinuities that render problematic some key terms by which Van Dyke's reception is being shaped. This raises issues of how forms of retreat are configured by situations retreated from--issues of gender and ethnicity, particularly. Chapter Four describes how terms of meaning and value are narrativized in the nature essays of Wendell Berry--particularly An Entrance to the Woods, from The Unforeseen Wilderness (1971). In Berry's work the intertwined formal and ethical aspects of the retreat narrative are fully elaborated. His essays dramatize a solitude in nature predicated on an ethics incorporating nonhuman place. Chapter Five explores sites and senses of writing in nature, examining a range of concerns about writerly activity, location, and artifacts. John Muir figures as a case study of writerly identity. A final section considers implications of literacy relative to nature writing's concern with indigenous existence. The chapter refers to discussions on the social construction of literacy--views which scenarios of retreat serve to complicate and correct.Ph.D.American literatureAmerican studiesLanguageLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129489/2/9513471.pd