Caught in the Cobweb: Posthuman quandaries in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams

Abstract

This thesis explores nonhuman landscapes in two works of contemporary nature writing, i.e. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986). A close reading of the texts vis-à-vis theories of phenomenology reveals the multiple approaches that each of the first-person narrators combines to ponder a non-anthropocentric interraction with nonhumans. As the name nonhuman suggests, this interraction is shadowed by an inherent discrimination, mirrored by nature writings’s classical question of the nature/culture dichotomy. My argument is that a shift from representation to interpretation is what exposes these narrators’ to the uncanniness of nonhuman agency and the perplexity of posthuman thinking. I will show that while Pilgrim at Tinker Creek does not move beyond this exposure, Arctic Dreams contextualizes the quandaries and allows its readers to probe into posthuman ethics by referring to snapshots of life in a hostile northern Arctic.