Occasions of Wildness: Literature, Simultaneity, and Habitation

With literature as a guide to thinking, this dissertation takes up the persistent cultural problem of wilderness. Wilderness---and wildness---have come to narrowly and unproductively suggest only those places and beings in the world considered "non-human." How this designation is made, however, pits reductive ideas of civilization against what is deemed its "other" (including other speices and humans deemed "uncivilized"). Despite challenges to this idea of wilderness (noting its ignorance of more than 10,000 years of human history in so-called "wild" places), the prevailing wilderness enthusiasm, primarily in the U.S., but increasingly worldwide, remains committed to a "non-human" wildness, with troubling cultural and environmental consequences.;Engaging a broad range of texts and genres, I argue for literary thinking as a way to imagine alternatives to how we think about wildness. In my readings, literary texts reveal what I call "habitation paradigms": the usually unspoken principles by which the living make their homes in the world and relate to and interact with others. Wildness, then, is a measurement of what does not "fit" or "belong" in the habitation paradigm. But literature, by revealing to ourselves an image of our present, also offers a way to describe new "hodiernal circles" (Emerson's term). In other words, literature can also incite paradigm shifts in our habitation, providing new ways to encounter, engage, and live with sometimes radically other beings when we and they "know simultaneity," in Adrienne Rich's words, without the immediate urge toward assimilation or colonization. Drawing on Emerson and others, habitation paradigms (and the wildernesses they delimit) are traced through diverse texts, including A. R. Ammons's poem Tape for the Turn of the Year, Thoreau's The Maine Woods, David Treuer's The Translation of Dr Apelles , Chief Seattle's "speech," Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home, William Morris's News from Nowhere, and Adrienne Rich's "Meditations for a Savage Child." These texts provide multiple temporal, cultural, and literary views of possible ways of living in a world increasingly characterized by occasions of wildness.