'The Body and the Earth': Rhetoric and ideology in the essays of John Muir and Wendell Berry

The dearth of recent scholarship regarding the rhetoric of nature writers John Muir and Wendell Berry has prompted the need for a close examination of their rhetorical strategies. This thesis also explores Muir's and Berry's rhetoric in relation to Transcendentalism and other traditions in American literature, and in relation to the relative political leanings of both authors. These rhetorical analyses are focused mainly on the author's two most famous works, John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra and Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Classic works on rhetoric, such as Aristotle's Rhetoric, of course, play a role in the analyses; however, Hayden White's Metahistory is used as the primary theoretical model. Metahistory also serves to examine the ideologies of Muir and Berry. To describe Muir's nuanced preservationist-activist ideology, I have used the term radical liberalism, in order to position him on the spectrum between the two positions, albeit closer to the liberal designation. Finally, my rhetorical readings of Muir and Berry's two works are weighed against each other.