Although Annie Dillard has frequently written about the subject of time, no serious study of her treatment of this subject has been published. The purpose of this study was to open the conversation, particularly in the light of her recent book, For the Time Being.Dillard's strongest interest in time is in the relationship between the temporal, time here and now, and the eternal, generally located sometime in the future, somewhere other than here. Since Dillard has repeatedly alluded to this subject in her previous nonfiction books, one may trace the development of her concept of time and eternity from earlier works such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone To Talk, and Holy the Firm, to its current expression in For the Time Being. She places her questions about time and eternity in a distinctly down-to-earth spirituality informed by modern science and sharpened by pungent humor.Beginning with an analysis of the influence on Dillard's writing of Romantics such as Wordsworth and Transcendentalists such as Thoreau but more particularly Emerson, as well as ancient Judaic thought, this study focuses on how Dillard blends with these theinfluence of twentieth century Christian theologian-philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin to form an eclectic spirituality that is distinctly her own.Though Dillard has often been called a mystic, her spiritual quest is intensely practical and purposeful: by cracking open the mystery of time she intends to discover nothing less than the secrets of God. This study concludes that Dillard is calling readers to recognize that the spiritually alive person can transcend the barriers of the temporal, experience the eternal in the present, and participate with God in the redemption of the universe. / Department of English

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1995. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Alayne Sullivan. Dissertation Committee: Lucy McCormick Calkins. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 179-182).

Peu à peu, depuis Descartes et Newton, la croyance laisse place au rationnel qui n'arrive toutefois pas à s'imposer dans l'esprit humain. Le présent mémoire tend à démontrer que, sans pervertir l'esprit scientifique, Annie Dillard, avec Pèlerinage à Tinker Creek, remet en dialogue le sacré et la science. Rattachée à la tradition des « American nature writers », Dillard adopte le genre essayistique pivotant autour d'une subjectivité centrale et centralisante. Dans cette double perspective, essai et subjectivité, nous suivons à la fois une narratrice en quête de connaissances sur le territoire circonscrit de la vallée de la rivière Tinker et l'auteure sur celui de l'essai. À travers ces déambulations, c'est également l'humain, dans son rapport au monde avec ses sens et son intellect en continuels ajustements, qui est étudié. S'il occupe, grâce à sa conscience, une place privilégiée parmi les espèces vivantes, le contact direct et immédiat avec la nature lui demeure interdit. La quête mystique, dont la narratrice fait l'expérience en s'abandonnant au présent et à ce qui l'entoure, tend cependant à replacer l'humain au coeur du vivant. Au-delà de ce temps toujours neuf, la parole, puisqu'elle n'est pas soumise à la linéarité temporelle, constitue l'ultime stratégie au problème du temps et de la mort qui lui est inévitablement rattachée. Invitant le lecteur à prendre part au pèlerinage afin qu'il change son regard sur le monde, le texte de Dillard a donné lieu, dans une perspective urbaine et environnementale, à un court essai (présenté au quatrième chapitre de ce mémoire) lui faisant écho. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Sacré, Science, Essai, Subjectivité, Humain, Connaissances, Mystique, Mort.

Thesis (Ph. D) -- University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1999. / "An enquiry into the relationship between place and space, and the writiing life, with reference to journals and poetry written by Diane Fahey, and to works by Eavan Boland, Annie Dillard, and May Sarton" -- p. ii. Thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Media Studies, University of Western Sydney, Nepean. Bibliography : p. 259-264.

By setting the writings of Etel Adnan, Annie Dillard, Marilynne Robinson and Rebecca Solnit into dialogue with those of the New England Transcendentalists, this thesis proposes a New Transcendentalism that both reinvigorates and reimagines Transcendentalist thought for our increasingly intersectional and deterritorialized contemporary context. Drawing on key re-readings by Stanley Cavell, George Kateb and Branka Arsić, the project contributes towards the twenty-first-century shift in Transcendentalist scholarship which seeks to challenge the popular image of New England Transcendentalism as uncompromisingly individualist, abstract and ultimately the preserve of white male privilege. Moreover, in its identification and examination of an interrelated poetics and politics of liminality across these old and new Transcendentalist writings, the project also extends the scope of a more recent strain of Transcendentalist scholarship which emphasises the dialogical underpinnings of the nineteenth-century movement. The project comprises three central chapters, each of which situates New Transcendentalism within a series of vertical and lateral dialogues. The trajectory of my chapters follows the logic of Emerson s ever-widening circles , in that each takes a wider critical lens through which to explore the dialogical relationship between my four writers and the New England Transcendentalists. In Chapter 1 the focus is upon anthropological theories of liminality; in Chapter 2 upon feminist interventions within psychoanalysis; and in Chapter 3 upon the revisionary work of Post-West criticism. In keeping with the dialogical analogies that inform this project throughout, the relationship examined within this thesis between Adnan, Dillard, Robinson and Solnit and the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists is understood as itself reciprocal, in that it not only demonstrates how my four contemporary writers may be read productively in the light of their New England forebears, but also how those readings in turn invite us to reconsider our understanding of those earlier thinkers.