| The essay has been central to American literature's response to cosmological collapse during the twentieth century, becoming an instrument of enchantment for writers trying to refashion world-orders in the face of environmental crisis. In Chapter 1, “Mermaids Singing: Modernity, Cosmology, and the Instruments of Enchantment,” I examine the influence of the idea of disenchantment on literary criticism, and contrast the essay's ability to construct an enchanted world-order. In Chapter 2, “The Oracle of Reason: Loren Eiseley and Rachel Carson as Prophets of Enchantment,” I demonstrate that they were unable to address environmental concerns within the confines of natural history and turned to cultural critique. This prophetic stage culminated in Carson's Silent Spring, which showed that the rhetoric of enchantment could be used to generate a political movement in defense of nature. In Chapter 3, “Survival and the Sunflower: Carson, Eiseley, and the Politics of Wisdom,” I show how Eiseley's Invisible Pyramid failed to inspire political action, which leads to another strategy: the wisdom phase. Its first book, The Unexpected Universe , defines a cosmic order where humans depend on our fellow creatures and hold their fate in our hands. Carson's final work, The Sense of Wonder, is also a work of the wisdom phase. In Chapter 4, “The Resurrection of the World: Counter-Enchantment in Wendell Berry and Leslie Marmon Silko,” I examine their revival of older North American worlds supplanted by agribusiness and colonialism. Their essays provide insurgent cosmologies which contest the account of the universe offered by modern economics, pitting sacred worlds against the profanity of world-consumption. In Chapter 5, “The Spirit of a New Order: Creation as the Image of God in the Feminist Essay,” I show how the idea of woman as man's equal in the image of God has been extended to the whole of nature. Alice Walker, Susan Griffin, and Gloria Anzaldúa's essays, as exemplars of feminist cosmology, demonstrate that the Second Wave moved well beyond issues of household justice, important as those are, into an engagement with the structure of the cosmos itself. |
