Annie Dillard

The problem of evil is not only a logical problem about God’s goodness but also an existential problem about the sense of God’s presence, which the Biblical book of Job conceives as a problem of aesthetic experience. Thus, just as theism can be grounded in religious experience, atheism can be grounded in experience of evil. This phenomenon is illustrated by two contrasting literary descriptions of aesthetic experience by Jean-Paul Sartre and Annie Dillard. I illuminate both of these literary texts with a discussion of the 18th Century philosopher Lord Shaftesbury’s concept of ‘enthusiasm’.

In her novella Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard draws from the deep tradition of Christian spirituality to probe the nature of human existence. The work chronicles the events of a three day period, yet as the poetic expression of Dillard’s innermost thoughts it addresses a lifetime’s worth of philosophical questions. Dillard’s method of writing involves turning the eye of her mind toward the smallest details of her environment. In doing so she finds an Incarnational peace of contemplative solitude. But a horrific, accidental plane crash shatters this peace and leaves a young girl named Julie Norwich permanently disfigured. The event forces Dillard to rethink whether a logos exists for creation, to cry out into the darkness of God, to test the crushing limits of human temporality. The tragedy of Julie Norwich is an apt lens through which to view the problem of theodicy in the life of prayer. What has the apparent passivity of contemplation to say in the face of real human suffering? Why is something as temporary, changeable, and embodied as a human being worthy of love? My paper analyzes Holy the Firm as a meeting place for Christian spirituality and ethics. I argue that the novella’s form (structure) and content (events and imagery) convey deep spiritual truths about the relationship between the material world and the work of God in Christ. Tracing Dillard’s matrix of poetic imagery through the novella’s three chapters, I find a symbolic journey of faith that parallels three major events in the life of Christ—His Baptism, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. Dillard’s personal tone urges the reader to follow along, to join her in discovering a metaphysical key that makes sense of the apparent dichotomies between “body” and “soul” and the “immanence” and “eminence” of God. Can humans achieve the “peace that passes understanding” through contemplation in a world that appears increasingly chaotic, arbitrary, and distant from God?

Throughout her putatively “documentary” works, the
contemporary American naturalist Annie Dillard locates her voice
using the framework of nineteenth-century American transcendentalism,
and specifically Emersonian pantheism; she seeks knowledge,
inspiration, and even identity from an impersonal nature coded predominantly
as male. In Dillard’s writing, pantheism functions as a discourse
of exclusively male merger with nature, leaving her protagonist in
a closed system where the endless transformation of pre-existing bodies
supplants sexual reproduction. In some ways, Dillard even wants figuratively
to transcend or erase her own voice and body and replace them
with those of an explicitly male nature; this desire is foregrounded in
her Emersonian wariness of all forms of self-consciousness. Even when
the subject of Dillard’s text is Dillard—as in the autobiographical An
American Childhood—the observing “I” cannot be the focus of her work.
But her still female observer, and the observer’s body, never entirely
vanishes from the tale. Most strikingly, Dillard’s work is not the autobiographical
or non-fiction nature writing of a contemporary woman, but
the trickster fiction, or tinkering, of a postmodern confidence woman
impersonating a male voice that is much older, in a number of contexts.
Winning a Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—
which more appropriately should have won a National Book Award as
a postmodern novel—Dillard anticipates an era of James Freys and falsified
memoirs and journalistic accounts; but Dillard’s “transgressions”
are epistemologically, ontologtically, and aesthetically deliberate. She
subverts two genres, women’s memoirs and nature writing, that many
readers trust as inherently authentic, by treating them as inherently
subject to manipulation. Dillard merrily leads readers astray until she
gives up the pretense of writing non-fiction altogether.

Little has been written concerning the discordant effects of Dillard’s
(possibly disingenuous) use of a transcendental male persona as
I attempt to elucidate them in this article. But critics have noted that
“realist nature writing . . . and Transcendentalist literature” often posit
“a male speaking subject and a female object of discourse, and further
assume a hierarchical relationship . . . in which the masculine subject
appropriates the feminine object to his own purposes.” (In
addition, critics such as Donna Haraway have argued that “feminist
objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about
transcendence and the splitting of subject and object”). Dillard’s
anomalous transcendental project simultaneously inhabits, recapitulates,
and possibly subverts this gendered, hierarchical tradition of
nature writing. Dillard’s rehabilitation of pantheistic male views of
nature, developed from the male writers of the American Renaissance,
acts less as a form of influence than a constrictive grammar of self-construction
and literary production in her work.

A collaborative review of Robin Cameron's solo exhibition "Memory Palace" written through correspondence between Madeleine Taurins and Parker Kay from September 10 - October 10, 2020.

"Memory Palace" was on view at Franz Kaka (1485 Dupont Street, Toronto) from September 10 - October 10, 2020.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has employed multi-scalar approaches to reveal the hidden relations of power and hierarchies that become expressed through discourse. Political ecology employs multi-scalar approaches in its modes of analysis, particularly in the modes of political economic and socio-environmental historical analyses, although no explicit call for multi-scalar critical discourse analysis has been made by political ecologists. Drawing from the works of both discourse analysts and political ecologists, this paper surveys critical discourse analysis research and political ecology research in an attempt to see where the two converge beneficially for environmental problem solving. This paper explores nature as a socially and discursively constructed idea and also as a material reality that creates conflict. Struggles over meaning, this paper argues, have contributed to the formation of many conflicts, and a powerful way to overcome these misunderstandings and miscommunications lies in analyzing more effective ways of communicating and using language. This paper demonstrates the convergence of critical discourse analysis and political ecology, relying on the literary imagery created by postmodernist author Annie Dillard to verbalize that which has not been said in the field, in order to render it more visible, understandable and useful.

This course offers an interdisciplinary study of the American natural environment and the role it has played in shaping American identity. We anchor our study by looking at the way ideas of the natural environment and the lands and waters of North America have been constructed throughout cultural history -- as kindred spirits by Native Americans; as a “howling wilderness” by the early European colonists; as a boundless inventory of resources that were "ours for the taking" by right of Manifest Destiny; as a school for the spirit by the New England Transcendentalists; as a precious inheritance in need of stewardship and preservation by 19th century conservationists such as John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt; as a crisis of global warming, environmental degradation and Sixth Extinction by Deep Ecologists.
Philosophically, we explore the influence on early colonists of Biblical and
Enlightenment thought, of the European Romantic movement, and the moral ambiguities of the American land and environment in relation to the slave experience and U.S. policies of "Indian Removal." We explore ideas of European Romanticism that gave rise to Emersonian Transcendentalism (America’s first homegrown philosophy), the competing theories behind forest management, the national park movement, and wilderness preservation and. more recently, the revival of Native American holistic values in ecological paradigms.
Beginning with Thoreau, who “went to the woods to learn to live deliberately, “ we read
primary texts of American nature writing, arguably one of America’s finest contributions to world literature, and we experiment with keeping nature journals. Finally, we discuss the bridging of the so-called "two cultures," science and art, in the work of writers Ed Abbey and Annie Dillard, paleontologist Loren Eiseley, and conservationist/activists Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Al Gore.

It is argued that certain individuals can and should be considered ‘morally exemplary’ with respect to the environment. This can be so even where there is no universally applicable ethical principle they employ, and no canonical set of virtues they exhibit. The author identifies Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Annie Dillard and Edward Abbey as potential ‘environmental exemplars,’ focusing for the purposes of the essay on individuals who have written compelling autobiographical works in defense of a way of life that is both attuned to the values of a particular place and attentive to the humanistic concerns that have more traditionally been the locus of ethical thought.

Presentation at Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing, 1996. Based on a section from chapter 3 ("The Sacrament of Wildness") of Catholic University Department of Religious Studies doctoral dissertation titled Sacramental Style and Vision Vision in Annie Dillard's Nature Texts.

“The mind—the culture—has two little tools,” Dillard explains in her essay "Total Eclipse." These tools are “grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel.” In this essay I discuss how the languages of scientific and literary writing can inform one another, augmenting the experience and records of the experience of the All-American eclipse.