Friday, April 7th
3222 Angell Hall

10:15a.m.-12:00pm Scholarly Panel

"Antinomies of Participation in Wilderness"

Description:
Construed as a term, participation entitles a key dynamic, even antipathy in environmental writing and criticism: that between saying and doing, words and action.  In various moments, participation can mean what a person does instead of reading, as a result of reading, and in the act of reading, in writing as well.  Participation thus constitutes the half-acknowledged substance of literacy studies, which concerns the provenance and impact of writing on individuals and societies—“substance” in the sense elaborated by Kenneth Burke, as infused by a paradox.  The word at once means that which is most essential to an entity, what it’s composed of, what’s inside; and also, as “sub-stance,” that which underlies an entity, its grounds, the conditions from which it arises, what’s outside.  All talk of context partakes of the paradox of substance, for defining an entity by reference to its context is to tell what it is in terms of what it is not.  What Burke calls “antinomies of definition” are antinomies that imbue environment especially: what environs, i.e. surrounds, is what lends essence, what individuates.  This presentation glosses antinomies of participation with respect especially to wilderness, the arch-“scene” in environmentalism’s terministic cycle, which signifies at once what’s most distinct from and what most attracts human presence and literate ministrations.  In the nick of time (near drowning in abstraction), it draws instances from John Knott’s work on wilderness writing to postulate how debunking and defenses of the term are informed alike by a multiform yet obdurate definitional “grammar.”

Publications:
Dramas of Solitude (SUNY Press)