Event Title
Near and Far: Burroughs and Muir
Location
Feather River Inn
Start Date
4-5-2001 7:30 AM
End Date
6-5-2001 12:30 PM
Description
"Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful of discoveries." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar"
Recently the pages of the New York Review of Books contained a polemical review of Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination by Leo Marx, author of the seminal study of American pastoralism, The Machine in the Garden. The two eminent literary scholars disagree about the fundamental orientation of environmental literature and ecocriticism: Marx asserts that nature writing and pastoral literature are separate and distinct types of work; Buell suggests that nature writing is a kind of pastoralism. The key to the debate is the relationship of human to non-human nature: is pastoralism necessarily anthropocentric, and is ecocentric writing, such as modern nature writing, therefore not pastoral? The purpose of this paper is to sketch out a map of American pastoralism at the end of the nineteenth century. My focus is the relationship between John Muir and John Burroughs, especially in their participation in the Harriman Alaska Expedition in 1899. By examining the texts of the two writers in Volume 1 of the 13-volume account of the Harriman Expedition by the Smithsonian Institution, I wish to argue that Muir participates in the broad version of American pastoralism that includes both anthropocentric and ecocentric orientations. My mapping is concerned with the concept of place in the works of Burroughs and Muir. For both writers, a place-based vision involves a dynamic set of relationships between retreat and engagement, nature and culture, the wild and the civilized, the far and the near. My paper will also set the Harriman essays in the context of each writer's work: for example, the revision of Burroughs's "Narrative" as "In Green Alaska" in the volume Far and Near (1904).
Near and Far: Burroughs and Muir
Feather River Inn
"Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful of discoveries." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar"
Recently the pages of the New York Review of Books contained a polemical review of Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination by Leo Marx, author of the seminal study of American pastoralism, The Machine in the Garden. The two eminent literary scholars disagree about the fundamental orientation of environmental literature and ecocriticism: Marx asserts that nature writing and pastoral literature are separate and distinct types of work; Buell suggests that nature writing is a kind of pastoralism. The key to the debate is the relationship of human to non-human nature: is pastoralism necessarily anthropocentric, and is ecocentric writing, such as modern nature writing, therefore not pastoral? The purpose of this paper is to sketch out a map of American pastoralism at the end of the nineteenth century. My focus is the relationship between John Muir and John Burroughs, especially in their participation in the Harriman Alaska Expedition in 1899. By examining the texts of the two writers in Volume 1 of the 13-volume account of the Harriman Expedition by the Smithsonian Institution, I wish to argue that Muir participates in the broad version of American pastoralism that includes both anthropocentric and ecocentric orientations. My mapping is concerned with the concept of place in the works of Burroughs and Muir. For both writers, a place-based vision involves a dynamic set of relationships between retreat and engagement, nature and culture, the wild and the civilized, the far and the near. My paper will also set the Harriman essays in the context of each writer's work: for example, the revision of Burroughs's "Narrative" as "In Green Alaska" in the volume Far and Near (1904).
