Revista de Letras - Utad

Clouds, streams and paths: from seeing nature as kinto seeing nature as self – an American journeyIsabel Maria Fernandes AlvesUniversidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douroifalves@utad.pt‘Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth’ Annie Dillard says(1988: 128). This is the starting point of a paper which aims to suggest how thedialogue between self and landscapes operates under the dictates ofinterconnectedness: if human nature inscribes itself in the physical world,whenever the landscape is observed, felt and contemplated, it is the self which iswritten. In this way, landscape is no more an exterior entity but an individualprocess of continuous renewal and rewriting.The dialogue between self and landscape has been made more relevant inthe last decades under Ecocriticism, a theoretical field which in its broadestdefinition is the study of the relationship of the human and the non-human, anearth-centered approach to literary studies (Buell 1996: 7). In an ecocriticalapproach the nonhuman environment in a text is not merely a framing device buta presence suggesting that human history is implicated in natural history. 1 It isaccepted that literary writing about place is local in the sense that its aims are toaccurately represent the characteristics of a particular place, of people firmlygrounded on the terrain they inhabit. Conversely, writings about place are a formof environmental writing because they characterize an interest in depictingnatural surroundings and in the relationship between places and those whoinhabit them. Ecocriticism, an academic version of environmentalism, holds aparticular interest in the way people interact with the community of the land,recognizing the relationship between environmental and place-bound writing.Throughout my academic career I have been working mainly on authorswho manifestly show empathy towards the idea of place: its geological,topographical, botanical and meteorological elements. Geographers of the self,1 In order to read a literary text according to ecocriticism, Buell points out four criteria: i) thenonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins tosuggest that human history is implicated in natural history; ii) the human interest is not understoodto be the only legitimate interest; iii) human accountability to the environment is part of the text’sethical orientation; iv) some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or agiven is at least implicit in the text (Buell 1996: 7-8)._______________________________________________Revista de Letras, II, n.º 9 (2010), 157-166.