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18 - Beyond the Cocoon of Humanism: Essaying in the Ecological Turn Through Contradiction and Being Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2023

Mario Aquilina
Affiliation:
University of Malta
Bob Cowser, Jr
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Nicole B. Wallack
Affiliation:
St Lawrence University, New York
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Summary

Though nature writing is produced across genres and fields, it is especially important to the genre of the personal essay. In the American essay tradition, for example, American Transcendentalists, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, wrote nature essays to explore and celebrate the relationship between the individual and nature, seeking ‘an original relation to the universe’. This dedication to exploring the relationship between humans and nature continues in the tradition of the American nature essay, such as in the works of John Muir, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard and Scott Russell Sanders, just to name a few. These essayists range in their explorations from the positions of observers and lovers of nature to activists fighting to save the environment from further destruction. Given essayists’ attentiveness, in a variety of ways and roles, to the human–nature relationship in the tradition of nature writing, the genre of the essay might be well suited to meet and, perhaps, even lead in the contemporary posthuman turn. While the posthuman turn seeks to address a variety of ideas that are central to humanism – including its overemphasis on human perspective, as well as its privileging of the rational and the autonomous individual over affect and social practices – it also in no small part attempts to head off (or at the very least address) ecological crises. To do so, however, the essay would have to confront its humanist tradition of privileging the essayist’s perspective as the source of meaning-making.

In a characteristic (if provocative) example of the essay’s embrace of humanism, ‘Emerson and the Essay’ (an essay itself), essayist William H. Gass responds to, reinterprets and expands on Emerson’s famous claim that life is ‘but the angle of vision’. In ‘Experience’, Emerson states:

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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