UC Berkeley

In this dissertation, I investigate literary, philosophical, and religious texts from the German tradition which use the figure of the desert to reflect on the conditions of their own possibility, and on larger questions of textual production, memory, and forgetting. I examine these works in four case studies that span the medieval period and the modern era: 1.) The anonymous 14th century mystical song Granum sinapis and several sermons by Meister Eckhart; 2.) Hölderlin's late hymn Der Einzige and novel Hyperion; 3.) Stifter's short story Der Hagestolz; and 4.) Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra. I pay particular attention to the ways in which the images of the desert in these texts function as figures [figurae] whose material and figural properties are deployed to interrogate language and memory, and to guide the reader into a landscape of experiential or speculative possibility. After sketching the rhetorical and semiotic relationship between the figure of the desert, memory, and writing in Western literary, cultural, and intellectual discourses, I investigate how the texts in my case studies reshape and redeploy this inherited tradition for their own purposes. Despite their significant differences, all of these texts engage in what I call "desert writing." This "arid" poetics reflects upon its own unstable, "sand-like" qualities through the explicit and implicit use of the desert figure, and through the metonyms of sand, dust, and ash to produce cognitive and experiential landscapes of possibility that push the limits of language and thought. Often represented as "deserts" themselves, these landscapes simultaneously produce hermeneutic meaning and non-hermeneutic effects of perception and sensation. In its unique ability to contain a non-binary "both/and" logic, to simultaneously evoke fullness and emptiness, positivity and negativity, literalness and figurality, the desert is one of the most productive figures for generating new forms of poetry, thought, and experience. This dissertation contributes to established criticism on the desert's poetological and speculative dimensions by synthesizing existing research and forming a new textual constellation that uncovers unacknowledged correspondences between medieval and modern texts.