An Ecology of Quotation and Quotability: Discourse in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek uses quotation and quotability to create a system of discourse founded in the messy ecological processes of consumption, digestion, and decomposition. Dillard quotes heavily from a myriad of sources, creating her narrating self as the processor and digester of a dialogic tangle of citationality. This overwhelming surge of discourse into the self leads to Dillard’s rich transcendence. At the same time as she quotes heavily, she unexpectedly denies easy quotability to her own text. Her prose is captivating but disrupts itself, preventing the reader from excising text out of context. This forces readers into more immersive and digestive meaning making and rejects the traditional Transcendentalist ethic of individualism, domination, and quotability. This process of discourse—of consumption through quotation, and decomposition and reconstruction through the intentional process of meaning-making beyond quotability—is an iterative, brutal, and ecological semiotic system that rejects Emerson’s clean microcosmic semiosis. Dillard's own observations of nature demonstrate this very ecological semiotic system of a tangled food web, with flesh and energy always being torn, eaten, destroyed, and reused. Dillard models a productive and discursive way to achieve transcendence and create meaning.

Type of resource	text
Publication date	September 8, 2023

Author	Waddoups, Sam
Thesis advisor	Greif, Mark
Thesis advisor	Ruttenburg, Nancy
Degree granting institution	Stanford University
Department	Department of English

Subject	Dillard, Annie
Subject	Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Dillard, Annie)
Subject	Transcendentalism
Subject	Transcendentalism in literature
Subject	Citationality
Subject	Quotability
Subject	Quotation
Subject	Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862
Subject	Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882
Subject	Emerson, Mary Moody, 1774-1863
Subject	Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich), 1895-1975
Subject	Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984
Subject	Digital humanities
Subject	Commonplace books
Subject	Fuller, Margaret, 1810-1850
Subject	Ecocriticism in literature
Subject	Ecocriticism
Subject	Semiotics and literature
Subject	Dialogism (Literary analysis)
Subject	Nonfiction
Subject	Feminist literary criticism
Subject	Creative nonfiction
Subject	Nature writers
Subject	Ecoliterature
Subject	Mysticism
Subject	Mysticism in literature
Subject	Lorde, 1996-
Genre	Text
Genre	Thesis

Related item	Title Undergrad Departmental Award Recipients, 2022-2023
DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/rk203zq9254
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/rk203zq9254

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Preferred citation: Waddoups, S. (2023). An Ecology of Quotation and Quotability: Discourse in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/rk203zq9254. https://doi.org/10.25740/rk203zq9254.

Stanford University, Department of English, Undergraduate Honors Theses

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