A Celebration of the Wild. On Earth Democracy and the Ethics of Civil Disobedience in Gary Snyder’s Writing
Abstract
The article attempts to shed light upon the evolution of Gary Snyder’s “mountains-and-rivers” philosophy of living/writing (from the Buddhist anarchism of the 1960s to his peace-promoting practice of the Wild), and focuses on the link between the ethics of civil disobedience, deep ecology, and deep “mind-ecology.” Jason M. Wirth’s seminal study titled Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis provides an interesting point of reference. The author places emphasis on Snyder’s philosophical fascination with Taoism as well as Ch’an and Zen Buddhism, and tries to show how these philosophical traditions inform his theory and practice of the Wild.
Keywords
Gary Snyder; the Wild; interconnectedness; interbeing; rivers; mountains; Zen; Ch'an; Tao
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Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Lodz, Poland Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8111-4998
Monika Kocot, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Lódź, Poland. Her main academic interests include contemporary British poetry, Native American prose and poetry, literary theory, and literary translation. She is the author of Playing Games of Sense in Edwin Morgan’s Writing (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016) and co-editor of Języki (pop)kultury w literaturze, mediach i filmie (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2015). She is a member of the Association for Cultural Studies, The Association for Scottish Literary Studies, and the French Society of Scottish Studies (SFEE). She is the President of The K.K. Baczynski Literary Society.
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