The Wilderness of Language: Toward a "Wild" Reading of American Nature Writing

This project comprises of a response much recent ecocriticism that has, in a polemical move, dismissed nature writing and the notion of “nature” as uncritical. In what follows, I attempt to outline a symptomatic method of reading that critiques these texts while at same time insisting on their relevance to contemporary critical thought. My primary theoretical approach consists of an active repositioning of the work of deconstructive literary critic Paul de Man. I use de Man’s rhetorical critique of hermeneutics to argue that reading texts of nature writing—Henry David Thoreau’s “Ktaadn,” Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire—succeed in producing the experience of alterity commonly attributed to the “natural” in the ways they force us to examine the nexus of language and meaning. Put simply, reading these texts “wildly,” which is to say rhetorically in such a way that they begin to disarticulate themselves, produces an encounter with otherness in that which is most human—language. In doing so, I argue that the close reading of literature has a crucial place in critical environmental studies because it problematizes the very position with which it begins, the human. What is typically lost in the contemporary critical humanities is otherness. The stakes here are high. Without an insistence on the otherness of the nonhuman, what we call nature, we struggle—as do many in the critical humanities—to articulate a case for both active conservation and non-intervention in the nonhuman world. Without an ability to articulate such a case, we seem doomed to continue down the road of the Anthropocene—the road of extinction and environmental crisis