UTA Annie Dillard Analytical Review

I’m working on a english writing question and need an explanation and answer to help me learn.

Respond to one of the following questions or observations by “free-writing” a full page of material without paragraph breaks, all the way from the top of the page to the bottom.

One recourse—perhaps an obligation, really—of a contemporary author writing about the natural environment is to bring something new to the experience: not just to see new places and details but also to bring fresh knowledge to the encounter. Read aloud Annie Dillard’s paragraph beginning “I walked home in a shivering daze” (Vol E 972). What do you find here that would not have been available to previous authors like Willa Cather, Emerson, and Whitman? What do these newer perceptions accomplish?

You can answer this question for this specific line, or any similar lines in any of the readings for your one pager. Imagine what would not have been available to American writers considering their relationship to the idea of wilderness one century earlier. How does the passage you choose bring “fresh knowledge to the encounter?”