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Out Of Despair, Into The Wilderness: A Study Of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim At Tinker Creek And Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts, Megan Casey

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

Annie Dillard and Gary Snyder are both contemporary American writers. Though Dillard's and Snyder's styles, concerns, and preoccupations differ, the narrators in Dillard's narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Snyder's long poem Myths & Texts undergo spiritual progressions that are astonishingly similar. Each narrator moves out of the dualistic world view of modern science into an experience of the world's paradoxical nature. Dillard and Snyder both create, through metaphor and mythopoeia, visions that offer an alternative world view from that of the despairing modern wasteland. I call my theoretical approach ecological criticism, and after performing close readings of Pilgrim at …