| dc.description.abstract | This study explores the ways in which certain American writers employ personification as a means of calling for adherence to an ecocentric view of the world and/or undermining the anthropocentricity that legitimates the arguably excessive human industrialization of wilderness. The use of this trope has been criticized by such environmental writers and philosophers as John Burroughs, Edward Abbey, George Sessions, and A.G. Tansley, among others, who argue that personification is inherently anthropocentric and thus rhetorically self-defeating. And yet the use of language, which includes the rhetorical figures, is basic to the symbolic action that is unique to humans. The history of personification theory from (roughly) Homer to Paul de Man reveals that no single definition of the term cuts across all time periods, though writers and scholars such as Vico, Nietzsche, and de Man, though not ecocentrists, promote the idea that anthropomorphism is the result of human presumptuousness. A number of nature writers, including Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Terry Tempest Williams, are aware of the anthropocentric pitfalls inherent in anthropomorphism, but most of these writers employ the device frequently, not to valorize the human subject, but to argue that living things and natural objects possess an intrinsic value similar to that of humans. Ecocentric and/or anti-anthropocentric personification is not solely a device of "nature writers"; it is also employed by a number of American poets and fiction writers, including Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Robinson Jeffers, and several post-World War II poets. | |
