Ecological Humanist Mosaics: Dislocations and Relocations of the Autobiographical Self in Terry Tempest Williams's Finding Beauty in a Broken World

• Main Author: Gill, Sharman Tullis
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2015
• Subjects: Anthropocene; Romanticism; ecological humanism; Terry Tempest Williams; Novalis; environmental ethics; eco-criticism; post-humanism; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/5945; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6944&context=etd

Terry Tempest Williams, in Finding Beauty in a Broken World employs literary techniques that suggest dislocations and relocations of the human subject in ethical modes of being. Through narrative techniques, multidisciplinary language, and themes of conversation, gift-exchange, listening and response, Williams reflects ecological humanist mosaics, suggesting cooperative regeneration—an intersection of material beings facilitated by an ethical human imagination that listens, receives, and gives toward patterns of beauty, including, but not limited to, being human in a collective world. This eco-critical analysis of Williams’s work affirms the human being in post-humanist philosophy and repositions relational Romanticism for the 21st century.