Naturerscheinungen. Die Sprachlandschaften des Nature Writing

The more nature seems to be lost to us, the more emphatically it is invoked. For a good two hundred years, a literary genre has developed in England and North America that attempts to bring nature closer to us. But what is nature writing? Jürgen Goldstein explores this question through classic and lesser-known authors of this nature literature by exploring the linguistic landscapes of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, Edward Abbey and Robert Macfarlane, Annie Dillard and Nan Shepherd, but also by looking at texts by Alexander von Humboldt, Werner Herzog and Marion Poschmann. Her plea for a more subtle experience of nature always includes the question of our own self-understanding. Nature Writing is not a consolation for city dwellers devoid of meaning who seek to rediscover in an idealised nature the originality and wildness that have been lost in their lives. Nature writing is rather a necessary corrective to the technical epoch of the Anthropocene. It is also a mirror of our longings: Nature Writing corresponds to our desire to deal with a nature that is not indifferent to the answer to the question of how a good life can succeed.