Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Re* Imaginings and Visions of America American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT) 42nd International American Studies Conference, İzmir, Türkiye, 23 - 25 Ekim 2024, ss.33
“We don’t need to turn it into a metaphor”: All Sentient Life Forms are Reverenced in Gary
Snyder’s The Present Moment (2015)
The quotation I used in the title is uttered by Gary Snyder in one of the interviews when he was asked to elaborate on how Tara the supreme Goddess or female buddha might signify numerous different things (Martin, 2007, p.161). What Snyder refuses is the mimetic principle of metaphor working through putting human action in the center. In The Rule of Metaphor (2004) Paul Ricoeur analyzes the working principles of metaphor from an ontological perspective along with linguistic, semantic and hermeneutic dimension and concludes that metaphor creates a new meaning or understanding that goes beyond a mere substitution. Thus, metaphors are embedded within larger narratives that shape our understanding of the world and they include “the rhetorical process by which discourse unleashes the power that certain fictions have to redescribe reality” (p. 5). The type of reality under scrutiny here is mounting concerns about destructive environmental acts, devastating earthquakes, tsunamis, and oil spills in many parts of the world which are the consequences of the anthropocentric world-view. To overcome the current ecological crisis, Snyder calls for reevaluating the concepts of progress and Enlightenment as the telos of the Western modernity. Snyder repudiates to form a new anthropocentric reality by centralizing human concerns and benefits at the expense of non-human entities. He is responsive to this paradigm shift with his recent collection The Present Moment and paves the way for embracing all life forms with their autonomy and ever existing harmony without establishing any hierarchy among one another. This paper aims to analyze how Snyder’s poetry revitalizes urban and natural spaces by letting all sentient life forms like animals or plants stand for the sake of themselves in poise and to explore how Snyder manages to represent them by defying setting metaphors from humanistic perspective.
Keywords: Gary Snyder, The Present Moment (2015), sentient life forms, Paul Ricoeur, metaphor.