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In this paper, I explore the environmental philosophy of three Californian modernists, who I have collectively named the Dust Dwellers: John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, and Jack London. I argue that these writers participated in a broader modernist response to the ascendancy of the Enlightenment and its manifestation in industrial progress. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the Dust Dwellers' response was distinctly informed by their American identity. They engaged modernist themes of decay as applied to Western expansion and the dissolution of the American Edenic dream. Investigating the fractured relationship between civilization and the environment, they searched for a philosophy that could reconcile humanity to nature. Specifically, I argue that their environmental philosophy displays intellectual and creative congruencies that can be traced to the common influence of twentieth-century psychoanalyst Carl Jung. The foundational tenet of the Dust Dwellers' environmental philosophy parallels Jung's concept of the unus mundus. Mirroring Jung's interpretation of this alchemic term, the Dust Dwellers describe a cosmic unity that encompasses all of life. I discuss depictions of the unus mundus across the Dust Dwellers' work and outline other implications of this central philosophic presupposition. Ultimately, I conclude that their environmental philosophy, along with other attributes, permits and even encourages scholars to approach these writers as a distinct group of American modernists. / Master of Arts / In this paper, I explore the environmental philosophy of three Californian modernists, who I have collectively named the Dust Dwellers: John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, and Jack London. I argue that these writers participated in a broader modernist response to the Enlightenment's failed pursuit of utopia. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the Dust Dwellers' response was distinctly informed by their American identity. They engaged modernist themes of decay as applied to the American frontier. Specifically, they recognized that America had failed to transform into a new Garden of Eden. Investigating the negative effects of industrial civilization, the Dust Dwellers searched for a philosophy that could create harmony between humanity and nature. I argue that their environmental philosophy displays intellectual and creative congruencies that can be traced to the common influence of twentieth-century psychoanalyst Carl Jung. The foundational concept of the Dust Dwellers' environmental philosophy parallels the Jungian concept of the unus mundus. Mirroring Jung's interpretation of this alchemic term, the Dust Dwellers describe a cosmic unity that encompasses all of life. I discuss depictions of the unus mundus across the Dust Dwellers' work and outline other implications of this central philosophic presupposition. Ultimately, I conclude that their environmental philosophy, along with other attributes, permits and even encourages scholars to approach these writers as a distinct group of American modernists.

"Edge Effects: Poetry, Place, and Spiritual Practices” focusses on the intersection of the environmental and religious imaginations in the work of five West Coast poets: Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hass, Denise Levertov, and Jan Zwicky. My research examines the selected poems for their reimagination of the sacred perceived through attachments to particular places. For these writers, poetry is a constitutive practice, part of a way of life that includes desire for wise participation in the more-than-human community. Taking into account the poets’ critical reflections and historical-cultural contexts, along with a range of critical and philosophical sources, the poetry is examined as a discursive spiritual exercise. It is seen as conjoined with other focal practices of place, notably meditative walking and attentive looking and listening under the influence of ecospiritual eros. My analysis attends to aesthetics of relinquishment, formal strategies employed to recognize and accept finitude and the non-anthropocentric nature of reality, along with the complementary aesthetics of affirmation, configuration of the goodness of the whole. I identify an orienting feature of West Coast place, particular to each poet, that recurs as a leitmotif for engagement of such aesthetics and related practices. In chapter one, I consider a group of Jeffers’s final poems as part of a project he designated “our De Natura,” attending especially to his affinity for stones and stars. In chapter two, I investigate both Roethke’s and Hass’s configurations of ecospiritual eros in accord with their fascination for flora, while in chapter three, I employ the concepts of “aura” and “resonance” to explicate Levertov’s meditations on the “coming and going” Mount Rainier-Tacoma and Zwicky’s reflective iterations of the sea. / Graduate / 2019-04-04

In The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in America, Leo Marx “evaluates the uses of the pastoral ideal in the interpretation of American experience” (Marx 4). While Marx explores ways that pastoralism has been impacted by factors such as industrialism, it is the purpose of this project to explore Marx’s assertion regarding the presence of the figurative and literal machine within the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers’ poetry is generally located within the landscapes of California. His lyric poetry has a distinct connection to the land and is driven by inhumanism, which works to shift the “emphasis and significance from man to not-man…” (Oelschlaeger 246). Jeffers’ machine like elements highlight the relationship between the natural world and humanity’s intrusion; in doing so, Jeffers furthers Marx’s supposition that American literature continues to be impacted by the machine, by “forces working against the dream of pastoral fulfillment” (Marx 358).