In the American Grain? Nature, Postmodernism, and William H. Gass

William H. Gass has repeatedly rejected literature’s mimetic function in favour of a seemingly endless series of language games. Such a stance would seem to render his fiction antithetical to the concerns of eco-criticism. However, in concentrating upon the collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), this article positions Gass within an earlier phase of postmodern aesthetics alongside the ‘open-field’ poetics of near-contemporaries such as Charles Olson. As a consequence, it is possible to locate Gass’s linguistic skepticism within the Emersonian tradition and, in particular, with the environmental concerns that underline Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854).