Notes from Source: This dissertation considers different kinds of distance – historical, spatial, ethical, and emotional – evoked in the work of three contemporary authors. Over immersive chapters on William T. Vollmann, W.G. Sebald, and Anne Carson, I address topics including American race relations, relations with indigenous peoples, South African Apartheid, the climate crisis, male friendship, religion, and the Holocaust. Distance, I argue, is an invisible obstacle to care and an as-yet-unwritten area on the map of one’s own making; at the same time, the self is thus conceived as a compass of conscience charged with engaging the people and places it alone finds essential to remember. Merging close reading academic analysis and personal memoir, I reveal the nature of place and the place of narrative as we construct the relations that condition the ego’s ability to connect to its physical and emotional environment. Thinking “prepositionally” (of, by, about) can help us connect consciously to the beings and things around us. Asking Where am I? What happened here? How do I feel? And why should I care? I explore landscape as a record of human conduct with the natural world, and I examine the language of landscape as a tool for converting far away facts about time and place into fictions we can come to care about in the here and now. The result of such inquiries is less a book of argued answers than an adventure in the accompaniment of thought, and an almost cartographic extension of care and community.

Further Notes: Book Title: Intimate Distance: Landscape, History, and Cartographic Care in William T. Vollmann, W.G. Sebald, and Anne Carson ISBN: 9798819374443