Abbey, Edward | Russell Burrows (essay date fall 2000)
Russell Burrows (essay date fall 2000)
SOURCE: Burrows, Russell. “Ontology vs. Epistemology: The Philosophical Dynamic Driving Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire.” Western American Literature 35, no. 3 (fall 2000): 284-97.
[In the following essay, Burrows applies Abbey's background in philosophy to his treatise Desert Solitaire.]
Desert Solitaire (1968), Edward Abbey's most important piece of exposition, has usually been approached from perspectives that are either rhetorical/literary or more specifically ecological. But Abbey's remarkable book is seldom studied in what would seem a natural context: philosophy. The tendency has been to skip Abbey's considerable background in philosophy as an incidental to his career as a nature essayist and an econovelist.1 One of Abbey's famous personality quirks was his ambivalence for academics, and yet he had been enough of a philosophy/English major at the University of New...
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