ANNIE PROULX’S BIRD CLOUD AND ‘LITERATURE OF HOPE’

Abstract

The paper focuses on Annie Proulx’s non-fiction work Bird Cloud and explores some of the ideas Proulx has postulated in her fiction, novels and short stories: a sense of place, home-ness, the history and archaeology of place, the sense of (non)-belonging, or conjunction and disjunction to use Slovic’s terms. Travel and relocation, prominent features of Proulx’s work, are what Barry Lopez describes as means of overcoming disjunction in remote locations and of cultivating intimacy with the landscape. Eventually they give rise to a fictional representation of landscape. We may conclude that for Proulx landscape writing becomes a “literature of hope” that