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Barker, Anna. "Green fiction : ecocriticism of the contemporary novel." Thesis, University of Huddersfield, 2016. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/32673/.
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Aghoghovwia, Philip Onoriode. "Ecocriticism and the oil encounter : readings from the Niger Delta." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/86488.
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Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The study seeks to understand the ways that environmental concerns and the phenomenon of oil production in the Niger Delta are captured in contemporary literary representations. In the thesis, I enlist several works, five poetry collections and a Nollywood video film, produced between 1998 and 2010, to investigate and analyse the different ways they engage with the effects of oil extraction as a form of violence that is not immediately apparent. Amitav Ghosh argues that representing something of such magnitude as oil modernity can only be done adequately through narratives of epic quality such as realist fiction or the historical novel. I move away from Ghosh’s assumptions to argue that the texts, poetry and video film have adequately captured the oil encounter, but not on a grand scale or through realist fiction. I situate Niger Delta representations of the oil encounter within the intellectual frame of petrocultures, a recent field of global study which explores the representational and critical domain within which oil is framed and imagined in culture. In their signification of what I call the “oil ontology”, that is, the very nature and existence of oil in the Delta, lived-experience in its actual quotidian specificity, takes precedence in the imagination of the writers that I study. I propose that the texts, in very different ways, articulate these experiences by concatenating social and environmental concerns with representations of the oil encounter to produce a petro-literary form which inflects and critiques the ways in which oil extraction, in all its social and environmental manifestations, inscribes a form of violence upon the landscape and human population in the oil sites of the Delta. I suggest that the texts articulate a place-based, place-specific form of petroculture. They emphasis the notion that the oil encounter in the Delta is not the official encounter at the point of extraction but rather the unofficial encounter with the side-effects of the oil extraction. The texts, in very different ways address similar concerns of violence as an intricate feature in the Delta, both as a physical, spectacular phenomenon and as a subtle, unseen category. They conceive of violence as a consequence of the various forms of intrusion and disruption that the logic of oil extraction instigates in the Niger Delta. I suggest that the form of eco-poetics that is articulated gives expression to environmental concerns which are marked off by an oily topos in the Delta. I maintain that in projecting an artistic vision that is sensitive to environmental and sociocultural questions, the writings that we encounter from this region also make critical commentary on the ontology of oil. The texts conceive the Niger Delta as one that provides the spatial and material template for envisioning the oil encounter and staging a critique of the essentially globalised space that is the site of oil production.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie ondersoek die maniere waarop omgewingsbelange en die instellings van olieproduksie in die Delta van die Niger-rivier vasgevang word in kontemporêre letterkundige voorstellings. In my tesis gebruik ek verskeie werke – vyf versamelings van gedigte en ‘n Nollywood [Nigeriese] video, almal geskep tussen 1998 en 2010 – om die verskillende wyses waarop hierdie tekste omgaan met die gevolge van olie-ontginning, as ‘n vorm van geweld wat nie onmiddellik opvallend is nie, na te vors en te analiseer. Amitav Ghosh argumenteer dat, om ‘n fenomeen van sulke geweldige omvang soos olie-moderniteit uit te beeld, slegs na behore uitgevoer kan word in narratiewe van epiese dimensies; byvoorbeeld realistiese fiksie of die historiese roman. Ek beweeg weg van Ghosh se aannames deur te argumenteer dat die tekste (gedigte en ‘n video-film) wel die olie-ervaring behoorlik vasvang, maar nie op groot skaal soos in realistiese fiksie nie. Ek plaas die Niger-Delta uitbeeldings van die olie-ervaring binne die groter raamwerk van Petro-kulture: ‘n nuwe studiegebied wat die voorstellings- en kritiese domein waarbinne olie gekonseptualiseer en kultureel verbeel(d) word, ondersoek. In hul voorstellings van die olie-ontologie van die Delta neem die ervaringswêreld in sy daaglikse werklikhede (in die gekose skrywers se uitbeelding daarvan) ‘n sentrale plek in. Ek konstateer dat die tekste, hoewel op heel uiteenlopende maniere, hierdie ervarings artikuleer deur sosiale en omgewings-oorwegings byeen te bring met uitbeeldings van die olie-ervaring ten einde ‘n petro-literêre vorm te skep wat die maniere waarop olie-ontginning, in al die sosiale en omgewings-effekte daarvan, ‘n vorm van geweld op die landskap en die menslike bevolking van die olie-ontginningsgebiede van die Delta inskryf, inflekteer en krities analiseer. Ek stel dit dat die tekste ‘n plek-gebaseerde en gebieds-spesifieke vorm van Petrokultuur artikuleer. Hulle benadruk die feit dat die olie-ervaring in die Delta nie die offisiële ontmoeting by die ontginningspunt is nie, maar eerder die onoffisiële ondervinding van die newe-effekte van die olie-ontginningsproses. Op hul verskillende wyses spreek die tekste ‘n ooreenstemmende besorgdheid uit aangaande die ingewikkelde rol wat geweld in die Delta speel – beide as ‘n fisiese, ooglopende fenomeen en as ‘n subtiele, ongesiene kategorie. Die tekste konseptualiseer geweld as seinde die gevolg van die verskeie vorme van ingryping en versteuring wat deur die logika van die olie-ontginningsproses in die Niger-Delta meegebring word. Ek suggereer dat die vorm van eko-poëtika wat hier geartikuleer word, uitdrukking gee aan omgewings-oorwegings wat in die Delta deur ‘n olie(rige) topos omgrens word. Ek maak die stelling dat, deur middle van ‘n artistieke visie wat gevoelig is vir omgewings-en sosiale vrae, die tekste wat in hierdie gebied ontstaan, kritiese kommentaar bied op die ontologie van olie. Die tekste verbeel die Niger-Delta as ‘n gebied wat die ruimtelike en materiële templaat voorsien om die olie-ervaring te visualiseer en te konseptualiseer, om sodoende ‘n kritiek te skep van die geglobaliseerde ruimte van olie-produksie.
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Stewart, Kirsty. "Nature and narratives : landscapes, plants and animals in Palaiologan vernacular literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:2c1ad3f2-6ca1-4a5b-b682-fbb0bfc58fd2.
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This thesis identifies the role of nature within Palaiologan entertainment literature. The texts on which this thesis focuses include a selection of the Palaiologan novels, namely the Achilleid, Velthandros and Chrysandza, Kallimachos and Chrysorroi and Livistros and Rodamni, as well as two other, more satirical works, The Synaxarion of the Honourable Donkey, and An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds. These texts seem to be different from earlier works in which nature is prominent, utilising such material in an innovative way. The study of these texts provides us with information both on the Byzantine view of the natural world and on the use of literature during a particularly troubled period of Byzantine history. My main questions therefore are how nature is portrayed in these texts and what can this tell us about the society that produced them. The study of these vernacular texts indicates that the natural world is given a prominent place in the literature of the period, using landscapes, plants and animals in diverse ways to express assorted ideas, or to stress particular aspects of the stories. The animals and landscapes provide hints of the plot to the audience, which the authors sometimes then subvert. The authors draw on earlier Greek material, but parallels with literature from other cultures show similarities which imply a shared medieval perspective on nature with local differences.
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Daw, Sarah Harriet. "Writing ecology in Cold War American literature." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/19367.
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This thesis examines the function and presentation of “Nature” in American literature written between 1945 and 1971. It argues that the widespread presence of ecological representations of “Nature” within Cold War literature has been critically overlooked, as a result of Cold War literary criticism’s comparatively narrow concentration on the direct effects of political and ideological metanarratives on texts. It uncovers a plethora of ecological portrayals of the relationship between the human and the environment, and reveals the significance of the role played by non-Western and non-Anglocentric philosophies and spiritualties in shaping these presentations. This study is methodologically informed by the most recent developments in the field of ecocriticism, including Scott Knickerbocker’s work on ecopoetics and Timothy Morton’s explorations of the problems associated with the term “Nature”. It finds significant continuities within these ecological portrayals, which suggest that nuclear discourse had an influential effect on the presentation of “Nature” within Cold War literature. This influence is, however, heavily mediated by the role that non-Western and non-Anglocentric philosophies play in writers’ theorisations of relations of interdependence between the human and the environment. Such literary presentations challenge the understanding that the Nuclear Age represents a conquest of “Nature”. Rather, they reveal that a number of Cold War writers present human interdependence within an ecological system, capable of the annihilation of the human, and of the containment of the new nuclear threat. The thesis’s introductory chapter questions the characterisation of Silent Spring (1962) as the founding text of the modern environmental movement. It outlines this study’s intervention into the field of Cold War criticism, detailing its specific ecocritical methodology and engaging with the legacy of Transcendentalism. Chapter One looks at the work of Paul Bowles, with a primary focus on The Sheltering Sky (1949). It demonstrates the centrality of the landscape to the writer’s creative project, and reveals the substantial influence of the Sufi mysticism on Bowles’s presentation of the human’s relationship to the environment. Chapter Two focuses on the work of the New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church. It establishes the influence of the writer’s familiarity with the Pueblo Native American worldview on her poetic portrayals of the human and the nuclear as interrelated parts within a greater ecological system. It also uncovers similar portrayals within the work of the “father of the atomic bomb”, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The third chapter analyses the effects of Chinese and Japanese literature and thought on the work of J. D. Salinger. It outlines the function of “Nature” in the work of the specific translators that Salinger names, arguing that this translated Taoism substantially informed the ecological vision present across his oeuvre. Chapter Four explores the impact of Simone Weil on the work of Mary McCarthy. It reads Birds of America (1971), demonstrating the governing influence of Weil’s concept of “force” on McCarthy’s presentation of the human as an interdependent part within a powerful ecological system.
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Tania, Aguila-Way. "Fraught Epistemologies: Bioscience, Community, and Environment in Diasporic Canadian Literature." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/31901.
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This dissertation examines the intersection between diasporic subjectivities and scientific knowledge production in the works of Shani Mootoo, Madeleine Thien, Larissa Lai, and Rita Wong. I read these authors as participating in a burgeoning scene of diasporic Canadian writing that draws on concepts and tropes derived from the life sciences to think through a broad constellation of issues relating to contemporary diasporic experience, from the role of biogenetic discourses in the diasporic search for ancestry, to the embodied dimensions of diasporic memory and trauma, to the role of diaspora communities in the decolonial struggle against the emergent forms of “biopower” that contemporary bioscience has enabled. As the first study to address this burgeoning topic in diasporic Canadian literature, this dissertation asks: Why are diasporic Canadian authors taking up bioscience as a key topos for the exploration of contemporary diasporic experiences? How is this engagement with the life sciences re-shaping current conversations about diasporic kinship, memory, and embodiment, and about the role of diasporic communities in contemporary struggles for environmental justice? Complicating frameworks that understand bioscience only as an instrument of what Foucault calls “biopower,” I argue that the works of Mootoo, Thien, Lai and Wong prompt us to rethink the ways in which queer, feminist, anti-racist, and environmental struggles might constructively interface with the life sciences to challenge emergent forms of biological essentialism and biopolitical control. I demonstrate that, by using bioscientific tropes to highlight the complex and open-ended life processes that shape the human body and the wider environment, these authors construct epistemologies that attend to the global networks of biopower through which neoimperialism operates while also acknowledging the interconnected ways in which living organisms and material substances destabilize these global flows. I argue that, in so doing, these authors position diasporic knowledge production as a crucial locus for the rethinking of relations between politics and ecology, and between humanist and scientific ways of knowing, that science studies scholars like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour and decolonial critics like Boaventura de Sousa Santos have identified as a central to contemporary struggles for environmental justice. Each chapter explores the work of one diasporic Canadian author in relation to a single, historically specific site of scientific knowledge production. Chapter one examines how Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night combines notions of gothic excess with a materialist emphasis
on the material agencies that inhere through bodies and environments in order to disrupt the gendered and racial discourses propagated by imperial botany. Chapter two explores how Thien’s novels Certainty and Dogs at the Perimeter draw on current debates around the neurobiology of memory and emotion to grapple, on one hand, with the fragmentation induced through diasporic trauma and, on the other, with the uncertainty of global risk culture. Chapter three examines how Lai’s Salt Fish Girl disrupts popular and scientific discourses concerning the genetic basis of diasporic ancestry to advance a model of kinship that is rooted not in a shared
ethnic heritage, but in a shared immersion in a complex web of interactions that includes genetic, evolutionary, and environmental forces. Finally, chapter four examines how Rita Wong’s forage mobilizes contemporary debates around the spread of genetically modified organisms to stage a productive encounter between diasporic, Indigenous, and scientific knowledges. I argue that, in the process of engaging with these various scientific debates, these writers stage trenchant
critiques of the colonial legacies and neo-imperial investments of contemporary bioscientific culture while also modeling more fruitful, ethical, and hopeful ways of engaging with scientific knowledge.
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Bourns, Timothy. "Between nature and culture : animals and humans in Old Norse literature." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:6f561cfd-74d7-4369-b4e8-a78f030ccb16.
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This thesis demonstrates how animals and humans are interconnected in Old Norse literature. The two categories are both constructed and challenged in a variety of ways, depending on the textual genre and animal species. It thus reveals medieval Norse-Icelandic ideas, values, and beliefs about animals. The thesis is theoretical, comparative, and interdisciplinary, yet firmly rooted in a close reading of the sagas and analysis of their cultural-historical context. The first chapter explores relationships between people and domestic animals, namely horses and dogs, and to a lesser extent, cats and livestock. The second chapter evaluates the limitations to the human-animal relationship: prohibitions against bestiality and the consumption of certain animals as meat. The third chapter studies animals in dreams, which reflect human characters and share their fate and defining characteristics. The fourth chapter investigates human-animal transformations, whether physical, psychological, or both. The fifth chapter analyses human-animal communication, with a particular focus on human comprehension of the language of birds. The sixth chapter considers relations between animals and gods in Norse mythology; these parallel the connections between humans and animals in the sagas. The thesis determines how the human/animal dichotomy might have been thought about differently before and after the conversion to Christianity, with boundaries between animal and human becoming more clearly delineated; it examines how medieval Icelandic authors wrote about animals in experiential terms, but also drew upon conventional symbolism from continental Europe; and it proves how these literary representations of animals reflect an environmental ideology that was actively engaged with the imaginative, the supernatural, and the animal.
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Bunthoff, Kathryn C. "Consuming Nature: Literature of the World that Feeds Us." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1241616520.
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Buckham, Rebecca Lynn. "Reading nature the georgic spirit of Paradise lost, early modern England, and twenty-first-century ecocriticism /." Click here for download, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1760071351&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=3260&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Boucher, James. "Representations of the Amerindian in French literature and the Post-Imperialist literature of Québec." Diss., University of Iowa, 2016. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2050.
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My research traces the evolution of the French vision of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas by establishing a genealogy of mythic paradigms which frame how French and Quebecois authors understand the Amerindian from 1534 to present. Myth informs French visions of the Amerindian from the earliest periods of contact until the present day. My research reveals the existence of a mythic representational genealogy in the history of French (and Quebecois) letters. Through the written word, reiterations of mythologies of the Native lead to the creation of a crystallized French cultural imaginary of the Amerindian which circumscribes possibilities for reciprocal understandings between French (European) and Native peoples. The Noble and Ignoble Savage, the Ecological Savage (which I also refer to as the nexus of Nature and Native), the Vanishing Indian, and Going Native are the mythologies and narrative technologies that have mediated (and continue to mediate) French thinking about the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Not only have these mythic paradigms determined literary representation, but they have also inordinately influenced the articulation of scientific truth about the Amerindian and the concretization of Native ontological difference from a Eurocentric perspective. The inextricable link between representation and praxis, confirmed by my insights into the mythic origins of scientific discourses (Buffon, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss), cannot be underemphasized.
The original myths in that genealogy are the Ignoble and Noble Savage. The Ignoble Savage myth presents the Amerindian as non-human, animal, or monster, in both moral and physical descriptions. The Noble Savage is an idealized portrait of the purity and innocence of Native peoples that Europeans connect to a simpler time and way of life, often seen as belonging to the past. Texts written by Michel de Montaigne and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are instrumental in the creation and propagation of this myth. An important consequence of the Noble and Ignoble Savage myths is an association of the Native with Nature in the French mind, what I refer to as the French cultural imaginary of the Amerindian. The link between the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Nature is a recurring theme in French texts that represent the Amerindian. The mythologies of the Noble and Ignoble Savage, including the association of the Amerindian with the environment or world of the non-human animal, influence early modern philosophical, religious, scientific and literary images of the Amerindian in French.
In the nineteenth century, the mythic paradigm of the Vanishing Indian becomes the prevailing vision of the Amerindian. Originating in the Noble Savage, the myth of the Vanishing Indian presents the Native as extinct or nearing extinction; images are often characterized by nostalgia and guilt. The inevitability of the disappearance of the Amerindian is a logic that informs representations of the Native in Chateaubriand’s writing and in French Western novels.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, French and Quebecois authors engage in the myth of Going Native. Following the metaphorical disappearance of the Amerindian according to the Vanishing Indian framework, French and French-Canadian characters undertake journeys of self-actualization that are catalyzed by contact with the (myths of the) Native. Through mythologized knowledge of the Native, non-Native characters are transformed into truer versions of themselves. Representations of androgynous and homosexual Native sexualities are significant elements in many narratives of Going Native, which I interpret through a queer critique.
In addition to literary forays, my dissertation focuses on how myths of the Native are presented in French texts that claim to produce scientific truth. In the eighteenth century, the field of natural history uses images of the Native that echo the logic of the Ignoble Savage myth. In the nineteenth century, one of the foundational texts of the discipline of sociology utilizes images of Amerindian gender ambiguity to formulate a distinction between primitive and modern peoples. In my conclusion, I examine how the mythologies traced throughout the study influence the father of structural anthropology in his text Tristes tropiques.
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Cloyd, Aaron Andrew. "Narrating Rewilding: Shifting Images of Wilderness in American Literature." UKnowledge, 2015. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/25.
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Narrating Rewilding analyzes interactions between imaginative writings and environmental histories to ask how novels and creative nonfiction contribute to conversations of wilderness rewilding. I identify aspects of rewilding in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, and Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge within a context of William Cronon’s and James Feldman’s works of environmental history, and I argue that the selected imaginative works offer alternative ramifications of rewilding by questioning Cronon’s and Feldman’s anthropocentric basis.
While Cronon and Feldman argue that a rewilding wilderness expresses interconnections between human history and expressions of nature, and that a return of wild aspects benefits human understanding and interaction within wilderness areas, in these imaginative writings, wildernesses are sites that flatten hierarchies between natural elements and human aspects, places where characters languish. They are lands deeply layered with both natural and cultural histories, but aspects of the past often remain beyond reach. Rewilding in these wildernesses equates with damage and loss.
Taken together, I argue that these narratives of wilderness rewilding augment one another, creating a dialog where Cronon’s and Feldman’s discourses of environmental recovery and of human gain inform corresponding imaginative writings but are also challenged by models of lament and loss. This restructured approach to wilderness rewilding offers a widened range of potential responses to an ever-changing, ever-rewilding wilderness.
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Wallace, Molly. "Novel ecologies : nature, culture, and capital in contemporary U.S. fiction and theory /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9329.
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Svensson, Filip. "Tolkien's Natural Pathos." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk och litteratur, SOL, 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-6585.
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Sexton, Melissa, and Melissa Sexton. ""An Aligned, Transformed, Constructed World": Representing Material Environments in American Literature 1835-1945." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/12431.
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This dissertation seeks to avoid two extremes that have polarized literary debate: on the one hand, a strong constructivism that reduces environments to textual effects; and, on the other hand, a strong realism that elides language's constructive power, assuming texts' mimetic transparency. Positioning itself within the ecocritical attempt to reconnect text and environment, my project articulates a constructive vision of material representation that I call "constrained realism." Katherine L. Hayles's "constrained constructivism" emphasizes the constructed nature of scientific knowledge while asserting science's truth; conversely, "constrained realism" re-emphasizes the material real's influence on literature while acknowledging representation's limitations. My project adapts Bruno Latour's work in science studies to literary texts, reconceiving written representation as a dynamic process of human/material interaction.
My reassessment of literary materiality extends to both canonical and neglected American texts that address representational anxieties about materiality. First, I examine how the work of Henry David Thoreau presents the relation between a material world and written text as actively constructed and mutually constituted, a relationship that necessitates Thoreau's self-reflexive engagement with language. A similar dynamic between material observation and skepticism about language informs Frank Norris's
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Baker, Jennifer. "Like a Virgil: Georgic Ontologies of Agrarian Work in Canadian Literature." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/39179.
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In this dissertation, I argue that two dominant perspectives on farming in Canada—the technoscientific capitalist perspective on modern industrial farming and the popular vision of hard-won survival on the family farm—both draw on narrative and aesthetic strategies that have deep roots in distinct, but related variations of the georgic tradition, which arrived in Canada in the eighteenth century and continues to shape literary representations and material practices today. Critics of Canadian literature have tended to subsume the georgic under the category of pastoral, but I argue that the georgic is a separate and more useful category for understanding the complex myths and realities of agricultural production in Canada precisely because it is a literary genre that focuses on the labour of farming and because it constitutes a complex and multi-generic discourse which both promotes and enables critique of dominant agricultural practices. I argue that, despite its sublimation beneath the pastoral, the georgic mode has also been an important cultural nexus in Canadian literature and culture, and that it constitutes a set of conventions that have become so commonplace in writing that deals with agricultural labour and its related issues in Canada that they have come to seem both inevitable and natural within the Canadian cultural tradition, even if they have not been explicitly named as georgic.
By analyzing a variety of texts such as Oliver Goldmith’s The Rising Village, Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, Al Purdy’s In Search of Owen Roblin, Robert Kroetsch’s “The Ledger,” Christian Bok’s Xenotext, Rita Wong’s Forage, and Phil Hall’s Amanuensis, I recontextualize Canadian writing that deals with agrarian work within two distinct but related georgic traditions. As Raymond Williams and others have shown, the georgic’s inclusion of both pastoralizing myths and material realities makes it useful for exploring ecological questions. The georgic is often understood in terms of what Karen O’Brien has called the imperial georgic mode, which involves a technocratic, imperialist, capitalist approach to agriculture, and which helped theorize and justify imperial expansion and the technological domination of nature. But as ecocritics like David Fairer, Margaret Ronda, and Kevin Goodman have argued, the georgic’s concern with the contingency and precariousness of human relationships with nonhuman systems also made it a productive site for imagining alternatives to imperial ways of organizing social and ecological relations. Ronda calls this more ecologically-focused and adaptable georgic the disenchanted georgic, but I call it the precarious georgic because of the way it enables engagement with what Anna Tsing calls precarity.
Precarity, as Tsing explains, describes life without the promise of mastery or stability, which is a condition that leaves us in a state of being radically dependent on other beings for survival. “The challenge for thinking with precarity,” she writes, “is to understand the ways projects for making scalability have transformed landscape and society, while seeing also where scalability fails—and where nonscalable ecological and economic relations erupt” (42). By tracing the interplay between imperial and precarious georgic modes in Canadian texts that have mistakenly been read as pastoral—from Moodie’s settler georgic to the queer gothic georgic of Ostenso’s Wild Geese to the provisional and object-oriented georgics of Robert Kroetsch and Phil Hall—I argue that the precarious georgic strain has always engaged in this process of thinking with precarity, and that it holds the potential for providing space to re-imagine our ecological relations.
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Grossman, Joanna Rebecah. "Shakespeare Grounded: Ecocritical Approaches to Shakespearean Drama." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13064927.
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Using the "Great Chain of Being" -- which was integral to the Elizabethan understanding of the world -- as a starting point, this dissertation examines the sometimes startling ways in which Shakespeare's plays invert this all-encompassing hierarchy. At times, plants come to the forefront as the essential life form that others should emulate to achieve a kind of utopian ideal. Still other times, the soil and rocks themselves become the logical extension of a desire to remove man from the pinnacle of earthly creation. Over the course of this project, I explore plays that emphasize a) alternative, non-mammalian modes of propagation, b) the desire to sink the human body into the earth (or, at a minimum, man's closeness to the ground), and c) the imagined lives of flora and fauna, while underscoring man's kinship with myriad organisms. In many of the works explored, a modern vision of materiality comes to the forefront, presenting a stark contrast to the deeply held religious views of the day. In flipping the ladder upside down, Shakespeare entices his reader to confront inherent weaknesses in human and animal biology, and ultimately to question why man cannot seek a better model from the lowly ground upon which he treads.
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Nyman, Jon. "Nature and Culture: Teaching Environmental Awareness Through Literature." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Sektionen för lärarutbildning (LUT), 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-25701.
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Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka och tolka relationen mellan koncepten natur och kultur, så som de är hanterade i Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or. Life in the Woods (1854) och Into the Wild (1996) av Jon Krakauer, med hjälp av en ekokritisk analys. Båda dessa böcker är baserade på verkliga händelser och upplevelser, och handlar om två individer som valde att lämna samhället bakom sig för att i stället leva ett enkelt liv i naturen. Några av motiven de hade för att göra detta innefattar ett missnöje med samhällena i vilka de levde, en längtan efter extraordinära upplevelser, och en önskan att hitta medel att förbättra jaget. Jag kommer föreslå att de båda huvudkaraktärerna delar åsikter och tankar om naturen och dess relation till deras respektive kulturer. Vidare kommer jag föreslå att några av dessa åsikter och tankar kan och bör implementeras i det svenska skolväsendet i syfte att åstadkomma en mer hållbar syn på naturen och dess relation till kultur och samhälle. Jag kommer föreslå en möjlig metod för att genomföra detta, vilken är inspirerad av Greg Garrard’s lektionsplan ”Three Hours to Save the Planet!”, som finns inkluderad i The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: skills for a changing world (ed. Arran Stibbe, 2009).
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Jordan, J. Kevin. "“The Nations of the Field and Wood”: The Uncertain Ontology of Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Literature." Scholar Commons, 2017. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6716.
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This dissertation analyzes the relationship between important intellectual discourses of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries and the ontological status of non-human animals. The Enlightenment marks a distinct change in the ways in which humans gather knowledge and interact with the world, a change that forms the foundation for modern relationships between human and non-human animals. Through a theoretical framework that draws from animal studies and ecofeminism, I analyze the ways in which the status of non-human animals is shaped by the intersection of multiple anthropocentric concerns. In doing so, this dissertation probes the foundation of what defines the animal apart from the human. I use the metaphor of the chain of being to chart the relative ontological status of animals across multiple discursive paradigms and literary texts. The first chapter explores animal status within the changing epistemology of the Enlightenment. As humans rely on a combination of reason and sensory perceptions to know and describe the world, human reason becomes the source of human specialness and superiority. Rochester’s A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind questions the privileged status claimed by humans based upon the lauding of reason. Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko exposes the complex ramifications for animal status within a narrative that relies on sensory perceptions for its truth-making strategy. The next chapter analyzes animal status in relation to human aspiration. Pope’s Essay on Man urges humans to use their reason to restrain their ambitions. This results in a relatively secure ontological status for animals. However, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe celebrates human ambition, which results in a lower and more tenuous status for animals. I then turn to the status of animals within the emergence of natural philosophy. Plays by Shadwell and Centlivre include virtuosi, who act as comic practitioners of the new science. Though the plays use science as a source of comedy, they reinforce the strict species hierarchy that rests at the heart of Baconian science. The analysis then turns to Thomson’s The Seasons, which employs natural philosophy in a manner that establishes a more egalitarian relationship between human and non-human animals. The final chapter analyzes the ways in which Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels imbricates each of the three discourses discussed in the previous chapters. The overarching trend that emerges throughout this research is that in texts that celebrate the human and human potential, animals occupy a much lower status relative to humans. In texts where human nature and behavior are met with skepticism or downright pessimism, the distance between human and animal shrinks, and animals occupy a relative status that is higher than in more anthropocentrically optimistic texts.
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Schroder, Simone. "Turning nature into essays : the epistemological and poetic function of the nature essay." Thesis, University of Bath, 2017. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.760937.
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The topic of this doctoral thesis is the nature essay: a literary form that became widely used in European literature around 1800 and continues to flourish in times of ecological crisis. Blending natural history discourse, essayistic thought patterns, personal anecdotes, and lyrical descriptions, nature essays are hybrid literary texts. Their authors have often been writers with a background in science. As interdis-cursive agents they move swiftly between different knowledge formations. This equips them with a unique potential in the context of ecology. Essayistic narrators can grasp the interdisciplinary character of environmental issues because they have the ability to combine different types of knowledge. They can be encyclopae¬dic fact mongers, metaphysical ramblers and ethical counsellors. More often than not they are all in one person. Where nature essays were taken into consideration so far they were mostly discussed together with other nature-oriented nonfiction forms under the label ‘nature writing’. This study proposes a different approach in that it insists that the nature essay has to be understood as a literary form in its own right. It explores canonical works of nature writing, such as Thoreau’s Walden, often for the first time as nature essays by discussing them alongside other typical examples of this genre tradition. In order to better understand the discursive impact of this form, I frame my discussion in the context of ecocritical theory. This means that I analyse my corpus of texts with regard to the ways in which writers depict the relationships between human and nonhuman spheres. Putting a particular focus on Germanic and An-glophone literature, the present thesis investigates central paradigms in the evolu-tion of nature essay writing. It covers a time period that stretches from its roots in late eighteenth-century natural history discourse to the present, identifying key epistemological, formal, and thematic patterns of this literary form the importance of which so far has been rather neglected by literary criticism.
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David, Sophia. "Eco-fiction : bringing climate change into the imagination." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/24331.
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As a global population, inclusive of humans, fauna, and flora, we are each subject, though disproportionality, to the risks associated with our planet’s changing climate. These changes are largely caused by our unabated expulsion of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. Our globalized world and economic activities have largely engendered the burning of fossil fuels. The 2014 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, which means keeping warming below 2°C, we need to achieve emissions scenarios relative to pre-industrial levels. Without such reductions we can expect substantial species extinction, increased food insecurity, frequent extreme precipitation events, continued warming and acidification of the ocean, global mean sea level rise, and more frequent and longer lasting heatwaves. Responding to this means collective action at a global level. In my thesis I ask how the novel can respond to and help us to cognise these demands, as well as to cognise the scale and complexities of climate change, its philosophical and physical implications, and to attend to the particularities of local place whist remaining global in its scope and vision. I argue that climate change gives rise to a new form of novel. My work is primarily concerned with eco-fiction and how it can raise consciousness about climate change. I consider that the novel, as a counterfactual narrative, can personalise the issue, create stories so that we have ways to speak about it and enchant us towards an ecological imagining. My thesis begins by discussing the existing genre of popular climate change fiction. This mostly consists of clichéd, post-apocalyptic and hero-orientated disaster narratives. These novels are often predictable and limited in how they can engage the reader with climate change. In my second chapter I look at how climate change affects and alters our language. Certain processes belonging to it lead to a loss of words but also to the production of new words. I examine these themes in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Marcel Theroux’s Far North (2009) and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007). My third chapter considers how climate change confounds scales and forms of measurement, as it can be invisible, trans-temporal and trans-spatial. I discuss this in reference to John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956), Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) and Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life (2005). In my fourth chapter, by close reading of Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010) and Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), I suggest how much of our existing climate change discourse has become outworn and fails to prompt critical reflection. In my fifth chapter I argue that particular mitigation strategies and consequences of climate change force us to revise certain epistemologies. I examine how this is represented in Jean Hegland’s Into the Forrest (1995) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012). In each of these chapters I suggest that creative writing and revising the form of the novel can take account of these aspects and bring climate change into the imagination. In my final chapter I discuss how Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) overcomes some of the obstacles associated with representing climate change in the novel. The Hungry Tide’s form, plot and characters are structured by the unique tidal landscape of the Sundarbans, Bengal. Popular fiction typically provides an egocentric account, concerned with the development and interior world of an individual. Yet, they must move towards a more holistic outlook, as found in Ghosh’s example, which can depict the wider interconnections of the nonhuman world. Though climate change is both global in impact and the response it demands, it is particularity with the local that I consider to be essential to eco-fiction. The complexity, wonder and incalculable interconnections and variety owing to place cannot be evoked without such particularity. Therefore climate fiction must balance itself against the broad demands of a global crisis whilst attending to the special character of place and fabric of the local.
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Coronado, Teresa Marie Freeman 1975. "Locating the butt of ridicule: Humor and social class in early American literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/8309.
Full textAbstract:
x, 196 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.This project critiques the performance of class identity through the works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial and early national period authors using the lens of humor, primarily as posed by Elliot Oring and Henri Bergson's theories of laughter and the ridiculous. My argument is that under the guise of laughter these works conceal the underpinnings of an American class system which can be revealed through close reading and historical research. In my dissertation, I examine the performance of each author in his or her own autobiography and the reflection of that performance within the larger frame of the development of American status structures. The characters in the texts of the authors I work with in this project demonstrate the use of the comic persona to, as scholar Robert Micklus states, "locate the butt of ridicule anywhere but in their own mirrors"; however, in my project I examine this within the context of class. Chapter I examines the work of Madame Sarah Knight, The Journal of Madame Knight, and William Byrd II's The Secret History of the Line --both of whom use humor to disguise their class insecurities. In Chapter II, I examine the performance of class hierarchy, as seen through Franklin's Autobiography and John Robert Shaw's John Robert Shaw: An Autobiography of Thirty Years, 1777-1807. In Chapter III, I examine the complications of race involved in class relations, using John Marrant's autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of John Marrant, a Free Black. Chapter IV examines David Crockett's humorous performance of the middle landscape frontiersman as part of a valorized national identity in The Narrative of David Crockett. The ideology that prompts the so-called invisibility of class in United States society today requires us to examine it under a critical lens; this project uses humor as that lens. In questioning the laughter of early American texts, we can see the class divides of early American society being created--an important step to realizing how these divides are maintained in our world today.
Adviser: Gordon Sayre
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Ferebee, Kristin Michelle. "Radiant Beings: Narratives of Contamination and Mutation in Literatures of the Anthropocene." The Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1554724339910557.
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Massey, Geraldine. "Reading the environment : narrative constructions of ecological subjectivities in Australian children's literature." Thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2009. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/31766/1/Geraldine_Massey_Thesis.pdf.
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Ways in which humans engage with the environment have always provided a rich source of material for writers and illustrators of Australian children's literature. Currently, readers are confronted with a multiplicity of complex, competing and/or complementing networks of ideas, theories and emotions that provide narratives about human engagement with the environment at a particular historical moment. This study, entitled Reading the Environment: Narrative Constructions of Ecological Subjectivities in Australian Children's Literature, examines how a representative sample of Australian texts (19 picture books and 4 novels for children and young adults published between 1995 and 2006) constructs fictional ecological subjects in the texts, and offers readers ecological subject positions inscribed with contemporary environmental ideologies. The conceptual framework developed in this study identifies three ideologically grounded positions that humans may assume when engaging with the environment. None of these positions clearly exists independently of any other, nor are they internally homogeneous. Nevertheless they can be categorised as: (i) human dominion over the environment with little regard for environmental degradation (unrestrained anthropocentrism); (ii) human consideration for the environment driven by understandings that humans need the environment to survive (restrained anthropocentrism); and (iii) human deference towards the environment guided by understandings that humans are no more important than the environment (ecocentrism). iv The transdisciplinary methodological approach to textual analysis used in this thesis draws on ecocriticism, narrative theories, visual semiotics, ecofeminism and postcolonialism to discuss the difficulties and contradictions in the construction of the positions offered. Each chapter of textual analysis focuses on the construction of subjectivities in relation to one of the positions identified in the conceptual framework. Chapter 5 is concerned with how texts highlight the negative consequences of human dominion over the environment, or, in the words of this study, living with ecocatastrophe. Chapter 6 examines representations of restrained anthropocentrism in its contemporary form, that is, sustainability. Chapter 7 examines representations of ecocentrism, a radical position with inherent difficulties of representation. According to the analysis undertaken, the focus texts convey the subtleties and complexities of human engagement with the environment and advocate ways of viewing and responding to contemporary unease about the environment. The study concludes that these ways of viewing and responding conform to and/or challenge dominant socio-cultural and political-economic opinions regarding the environment. This study, the first extended work of its kind, makes an original contribution to ecocritical study of Australian children's literature. By undertaking a comprehensive analysis of how texts for children represent human engagement with the environment at a time when important environmental concerns pose significant threats to human existence, I hope to contribute new knowledge to an area of children's literature research that to date has been significantly under-represented.
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O'Donoghue, James. "“From Behind The Plow”: Agrarianism And Racial Uplift In African American Literature, 1881-1917." OpenSIUC, 2020. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/1809.
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My study challenges our current valorization of movement and flow in readings of African American literature. I do so through an exploration of the representations of the black agrarian masses who either choose to remain or could not afford the spectacular forms of escape to urban life which many essentialized as freedom. In the dramatic and pivotal decades following emancipation, African American leaders attempted to check the growing apartheid by the “combination” of diverse African American communities: North and South, professional and working class. This required that they move beyond the question of whether one was free or slave to the more tangled questions of freedom related to economic class, access to and distinctions of culture, and the opportunities of the city versus the country. Their writing was one means to seek out a more nationally defined community, but their efforts towards racial unity had to resolve the conspicuous differences regarding region and class. A difficult negotiation of difference ensued. In this negotiation, I argue, an agrarian form of freedom manifests itself in the literature of the professional class despite the intraracial pressures of “uplift” ideology which skewed representation toward middle-class life. The politics as well as the values and culture of the agrarian class surface. The agrarian themes of community, remaining, and an environmentalism of the poor contest the valorization of urban industrialism and self-made man ideology which are linked to presentations of a city-life as a life of freedom.
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Kuchta, Carolye. "Dousing the flame : an ecocritical examination of English-Canadian love stories." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/4169.
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This thesis is written in three segments: a novel excerpt, an introduction to the genre of English-
Canadian love stories; and a critical reflection on the creative process. The introduction to the
genre is written in the style of a book introduction and is intended for a general audience. My
ecocritical examination of love stories in English-Canadian fiction concludes that these stories
tend to be banal subplots that are nonetheless deeply engaged with nature. In this thesis, “love”
always refers to the intimate love shared between two lovers or would-be lovers, be they married
or unmarried, gay or straight, very young or elderly. Western culture often posits marriage as the
pinnacle of accomplished intimate love, though the books researched for this project profoundly
object to this viewpoint. Furthermore, the tendency toward scant, emotionally-impotent, and
distinctly un-sexy depictions of love doesn’t register indifference; it registers disillusionment. I
assert that a meaningful, distinct, and supportive correlation exists between love stories and
nature-human stories in these texts. Where more nature is present, more love is present and vice
versa. Where nature is less visible, love is less visible and vice versa. I use the term “ecology of
love” to address these instrinsic links—the in between—between humans and nature. The first
section of the thesis explores this phenomenon through the story and characters of an original
novel excerpt. The second section discusses the reasons for banality, which involve social ennui
and disillusionment, geographic obstacles, moral propriety, and the unique conditions that arise
in a nation of immigrants.
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Stuhr, Tracy Jill. "Re-sounding natures : voicing the non-human in Medieval English poetry." Diss., University of Iowa, 2013. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/1911.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation examines how the non-human (the natural, not the other-worldly) world and its creatures were voiced in several late medieval English texts: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale and Manciple's Tale, and the Towneley Second Shepherds' Play. The dissertation is organized into three chapters which severally allocate voicing the non-human to three different (although conceivably overlapping) modes of representation - acoustic, formal, and performative. Underpinning this project is the objective to place these texts in a historicized ecocritical context.
In the first chapter I analyze the figurative (and formative) sounds the natural world "speaks" as it advances a crescendo of insistent clamor in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I argue that this poem exploits the common (and serviceable) conviction of the analogous equivalency of the two categories woman and nature - in order to register the anxieties engendered by the encroachments of women and the natural world in post-plague England. The second chapter addresses how the voices of domestication and its discontents unfold in the use Chaucer makes of the protean genres of fable and exemplum, proverbs, and the deployment of similes in two of his bird tales. I rely on current theorizing of interspecies and intra-species domestication to identify and extract the discontents I have found to be inhering in its processes: savagery/violence, hybridity, uninvited and unintended transformations, and theft. The third chapter considers how human and non-human voices confoundingly yet steadily implicated and entangled in one another - performatively discover homes amid multiple ranges, including silence, volume, laughter, and music. This chapter represents the effort to subtend and complicate existing understandings of this popular late medieval pageant by thinking in terms of ranges, variations, and multivalent characterizations, rather than slots, hierarchies, stabilities, and characters who have become little more than canned effigies.
In conclusion, I argue that late medieval poetic texts show a remarkable diversity in the ways and means their authors chose to variously voice the non-human, and that the particular forms this voicing took shaped, even as it was shaped, by the non-human world around them. This diversity and variation enables a more complex understanding of the different avenues and directions this voicing afforded to succeeding generations.
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Jagger, Jeremy Davis. "Evolving Wilds: Auden, Ecology, and the Formation of a New Poetics." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1586272515332334.
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Westerman, Jennifer H. "Landscapes of labor : nature, work, and environmental justice in Depression-era fiction /." abstract and full text PDF (UNR users only), 2009. http://0-gateway.proquest.com.innopac.library.unr.edu/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3342624.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2008."May, 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-212). Library also has microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [2009]. 1 microfilm reel ; 35 mm. Online version available on the World Wide Web.
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Sheaffer, Lucas. "Damming the American Imagination." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2019. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/562228.
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EnglishPh.D.
This work intervenes in the complex relationship between the large-scale management and exploitation of water in the United States and its impact on the bioregional literary imagination in the Tennessee Valley between 1933-1963. It shows through site-based environmental criticism and literary analysis that the “dam” becomes a material and symbolic place of convergence where one can examine the relationship between humans and their biospheres. As interdisciplinary rhetorical, literary, historical, archival and cultural analysis, this work engages writers such as David E. Lilienthal, William Bradford Huie, Robert Penn Warren, and Madison Jones in order to reveal the inherently conflicted realities of environmental conservation, individual identity, and displaced regional imaginations in American literature.
Temple University--Theses
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Goldsmith, Jenna L. "Life Matter: Women Subjects and Women's Objects in Innovative American Poetry." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/47.
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Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, and Juliana Spahr employ innovative poetic practices attuned to nature and environment in order to understand their personal lives and depict these understandings for readers. My dissertation investigates how these poets enact an inclusive posture toward environment that many innovative and experimental women poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries possess, but are rarely recognized for. To this end, my dissertation provides counterarguments to characterizations of innovative or experimental poetic practices as reclusive, language-centric, opaque, and/or disconnected from the material world. I offer readings of poems, prose pieces, film, and art, to illustrate how materially innovative poetry compels an equally material framework for reading that is, at a foundational level, by and about the world.
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Alcorn, Haili A. "Beauty and the Beasts: Making Places with Literary Animals of Florida." Scholar Commons, 2018. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7462.
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Place theory examines the relationship between human identity and physical locations, asking how meaningful attachments are formed between people and the spots they visit or in which they live. Literature of place exhibits this relationship and the myriad ways humans connect to their environment through storytelling, both fictional and nonfictional. Florida literature, an emerging and dynamic genre, features characters, cultures, and histories heavily embedded in place. Florida’s places also abound with animal presences, and literature about Florida almost always illustrates significant human-animal interactions that drive plots and character development. Therefore, Florida literature invites consideration of how animals influence human attachment to the land in stories written by Florida authors. Scholarly attention has noted the important relationships formed by humans and animals in literature about Florida, but no extensive study incorporating place theory, ecocriticism, and close reading has been done on the literary representation of Florida animals or their contribution to the state’s diverse reputations.
This dissertation brings together theories about place attachment, ecocriticism, and critical animal studies (CAS) to illustrate the roles of fictional and nonfictional animals in works by six Florida authors: William Bartram, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Elizabeth Bishop, Rachel Carson, and John Henry Fleming. These works contain prominent animal characters that illuminate four ways of seeing Florida: idyllic Florida, wild Florida, opportunistic Florida, and mysterious Florida. These identities build off historical views about Florida as place: explorers, tourists, and developers projected their hopes for advancement onto the state based on its reputation as an exotic paradise, wild hinterland, or untouched beacon for industry and agriculture. Literature helped to produce these ideas about Florida through travel writing, but Florida stories also critique opportunistic ideologies responsible for harming animals and the environment. Literature can also preserve Florida’s mysteries and myths, offering narratives about nature and animals that challenge notions of human superiority. Thus, literature enacts a dynamic engagement with the four faces of Florida I discuss.
Florida animals are vital to the construction of these four identities. For example, Henry Bunk, the protagonist of Douglas’s Alligator Crossings, sees the Everglades as an idyllic alternative to the city for its many birds and fish. Rawlings depicts Cross Creek as a wild host to deadly snakes, predatory big cats, and ubiquitous insects. Bishop captures through poetry the ordinary activity of Florida fishing in such a way that invites us to question the harm inflicted on animals for the opportunity of recreation. Fleming’s stories suggest that exploration, industry, and science have mostly erased the mysteries of Florida’s natural world, but his enigmatic and monstrous animals, along with their ties to the land, offer hope for reviving a meaningful attachment to the land.
This dissertation connects literary representations of animals to real forms of violence occurring in Florida today, including fishing, caged hunting, and animal captivity. The works examined herein can prompt readers to rethink their own relationships to place and to nonhuman nature. As a cultural force, literature holds the potential for effecting change in our world. Beginning with the local is one way of witnessing this potential for the dynamic interplay between literature and place.
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Finn, Margaret Louise. "Immanent Nature: Environment, Women, and Sacrifice in the Nature Writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Sarah Orne Jewett." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2010. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/60456.
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EnglishPh.D.
There remains in Hawthorne criticism today, despite critical rediscovery of his texts in terms of the public sphere, an echo of denunciation that he did not do the cultural work that his contemporaries did, that he "distrusted" and "punished" women, and that his work is irrelevant to today's young readers. He has been largely neglected, as well, by contemporary environmental critics who have found nature in his texts to be insufficiently mimetic. This ecocritical reading of Hawthorne in conjunction with that of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Sarah Orne Jewett resolves these critical problems in that he is established as a nature writer, narratively rendering nature observation (sketches) and an environmental agenda (tales and novels) of expiation for maternal wilderness penetration. The all-important work of Hawthorne might then be called ecological, making him highly relevant in today's world. He is relevant in terms of women, as well, as nature unfolds in gendered terms in his works, and he, along with Sedgwick, positions the human female at scenes of primal violence at the heart of New England colonization, which set in motion the devastation of the American wilderness. Hawthorne's female is a corrective presence to which males remain blind. Jewett envisions a post-white-masculine-hegemonic world of female ascendancy, based on female symbiosis with nature, the fruition of Hawthorne and Sedgwick's preferencing of the female. Environmental criticism examines the human-nature relationships and ecological subtexts in literary texts and encompasses a critique of American culture, a gendered understanding of the landscape, an application of geographical discussion of place and of concepts from ecology and conservation biology. It employs a multi-disciplinary perspective and calls for the addition of "worldnature" or "environmentality" to the categories of cultural criticism. This ecocritical approach combines the historical philosophical, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic perspective of Patocka, Lacan, Derrida, and Staten with ecofeminism, integrating matters of geology, ecology, art, nature writing, and quantum mechanical physics.
Temple University--Theses
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Kerslake, Lorraine. "Correcting Cultures's Error: The Voice of Nature in Ted Hughes's Children's Writing." Doctoral thesis, Universidad de Alicante, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10045/110925.
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Sin duda todos los lectores y críticos de Ted Hughes estarían de acuerdo en considerarlo como uno de los poetas más importantes en la literatura inglesa del siglo XX. A pesar de ello, Hughes también fue un autor prolífico de literatura infantil, publicando a lo largo de su vida más de 25 libros para niños en forma de poesía, prosa, teatro y ensayos críticos. De hecho, escribió su primer libro de cuentos, How the Whale Became, en 1956 en lo que entonces era un pequeño pueblo de pescadores llamado Benidorm, durante su luna de miel con Sylvia Plath. Sin embargo, sorprende que la crítica no se haya centrado en el estudio de la literatura infantil de Hughes. En respuesta a la sensibilización en torno a la crisis ambiental que comenzó en el siglo pasado, la obra de Hughes indaga sobre las fracturas que han alejado al ser humano del mundo natural y tiene como objetivo restablecer el nexo de unión entre la humanidad y la naturaleza. Tal y como se explica en este estudio, la concienciación ecológica de Hughes se forjó en su infancia, en sus andanzas por el mundo natural que lo rodeaba. Al igual que en la obra infantil más madura del poeta, los primeros poemas sobre animales ya mostraban una preocupación por la conservación de las especies locales donde el apego hacia el mundo natural y el deseo de volver a conectar con la naturaleza a menudo se expresan a través de una preocupación constante por la educación ambiental. El universo creativo de la obra de Hughes se puede leer como un contexto para cicatrizar la fractura de la sociedad occidental con la naturaleza y un intento de volver a acercar la cultura humana a sus raíces. Es precisamente en ese contexto que Hughes desarrolla su búsqueda chamánica donde el chamán/poeta actúa como narrador, sanador y mediador, articulándose en un lenguaje sagrado en sintonía con el mundo natural. La función terapéutica y sanadora de la naturaleza está estrechamente relacionada con otros conceptos claves que Hughes explora a lo largo de su obra infantil tales como el mito, la imaginación, y la educación. De hecho, son temas integrados en su actitud como escritor y que forman parte de su universo literario. Para Hughes, los niños constituyen un público ideal puesto que todavía no han sido condicionados por la sociedad. Su literatura infantil representó una parte oculta de su ser autobiográfico, estrechamente relacionado con su búsqueda terapéutica de curación. En este sentido la misión sanadora de Hughes es doble. A nivel personal su obra se puede leer como una historia de redención, una alegoría de curar su ser fracturado. Por otra parte, su obra se puede leer también como una búsqueda para recuperar el equilibrio con el fin de curar las heridas que nos han distanciado de la naturaleza, para que la reconciliación entre cultura y naturaleza pueda llevarse a cabo. Teniendo en cuenta todo lo expuesto, surge la pregunta de hipótesis de esta tesis: ¿existe una búsqueda de curación en la literatura infantil de Ted Hughes? Para contestarlo se ha contextualizado la obra de Hughes en relación con los textos principales de la ecocrítica y he llevado a cabo un escrupuloso análisis de su literatura infantil a través de su poesía, prosa y teatro además de sus ensayos críticos y cartas. A través de una lectura ecocrítica de la obra de Hughes se ha planteado preguntas claves cómo las siguientes: ¿Cómo se relaciona su literatura infantil con nuestra crisis ecológica y qué es lo que pone de manifiesto una lectura ecocrítica de su obra? ¿Es su escritura sensible a temas relacionados con el medio ambiente? ¿Qué preguntas relativas a cuestiones medioambientales suscita su obra? ¿Qué sentido de curación y recuperación ecológica aparece en su literatura tanto en el ámbito personal como social? ¿En qué obras se consigue este aspecto redentor y equilibrio y armonía entre la naturaleza y la humanidad y en cuáles no? Tal y como se defiende en esta tesis, a través de la literatura infantil, Hughes esconde un ser autobiográfico oculto estrechamente ligado con su búsqueda catártica de curación. La mayor parte de la obra de Hughes responde o bien a una crisis personal y humana, o a una fractura del ser humano con la naturaleza. A través de la figura de la diosa y el poder del mito fue capaz de explorar las energías primigenias del mundo natural, así como las fuerzas creativas y destructivas del universo. La poesía de Hughes critica estas dualidades señalando el sentido de la absoluta alteridad de la naturaleza y las relaciones entre estas energías y la sociedad occidental quien se ha distanciado de la naturaleza. En su poesía adulta, dada la energía masculina predominante y la carga sexual y violencia que subyace en gran parte de su trabajo, rara vez se logra el equilibrio entre esas energías y fuerzas. Por otro lado, tal y como esta tesis argumenta, es en su literatura infantil – en su prosa, poesía y teatro – donde tiene lugar ese equilibrio de forma más exitosa, siendo terapéuticamente más redentor gracias a su efecto sanador. Con el fin de enmarcar el concepto de curación en su literatura infantil esta tesis doctoral se ha estructurado en dos partes: la Primera Parte, ‘Speaking Through the Voice of Nature’ (Hablando a través de la voz de la naturaleza), consta de tres capítulos y está dedicada a situar al lector dentro del marco teórico y de los aspectos biográficos más importantes de la vida de Hughes, así como su temprana relación con el mundo natural y su desarrollo como escritor y ecologista. La segunda Parte, ‘The Quest for Healing in Ted Hughes’s Children’s Writing’ (La búsqueda de curación en la literatura infantil de Ted Hughes), se centra en el análisis de sus obras literarias a través de los distintos géneros. Finalmente, tras el análisis de sus obras, la conclusión identifica los puntos principales de la investigación y los resultados del análisis.
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Krieg, Charles. "Nature Industries: U.S. Environmental Fictions after Fordism, 1971-2011." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/20697.
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This dissertation recontextualizes literary, critical, and popular models of nature in contemporary American fiction, and argues that the transformations in the post-Fordist economy reframe environmental concepts and their uses in a new light. Scholars in the environmental humanities have long recognized that understanding changes in the political economy are a key way to understanding our ideas and representations of the natural world. These ideas serve as metaphysical models that relate individuals to society and to the broader world described by the sciences. However, much environmental criticism only goes so far as to historicize, either arguing that images of nature are wholly determined by structures and institutions of power, or, by privileging certain ideas of nature as absolute, critics lay claim to an imagined oppositional, but no less normative, space outside of society. Nature Industries intervenes in this dilemma by drawing on pragmatist and cultural studies methods to reconstruct the experience of American life in the aftermath of Fordism. Constructing this historical conjuncture enables interpretive practices which foreground the diverse political articulation of environmental figuration.
The title is a play on Horkheimer and Adorno’s 1944 essay on “the culture industry,” which announced that cultural production had been subsumed into monopoly capitalism. Following culture, nature has undergone a similar loss of perceived autonomy. From the affective to the biogenetic, informational to the atmospheric, post-Fordist technologies and economies intervene in the world at scales that previous vocabularies struggle to describe without the help of fiction. Contemporary capitalism not only produces new natures—new combinations of nature and culture, or new “natural-history”—but, given the ecological consequences of industrialism, environmentalists too are forced to intervene in ways that would give pause to previous generations of conservationists. Rather than announcing the “death of Nature,” as the fictionalized Immanuel Kant does in the final moments of Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), we encounter a proliferation of natures, each with their own political valence, and each mobilizing a different set of social and natural referents in the public sphere.
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Reis, Ashley E. "With the Earth in Mind: Ecological Grief in the Contemporary American Novel." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2016. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc849760/.
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"With the Earth in Mind" responds to some of the most cutting-edge research in the field of ecocriticism, which centers on ecological loss and the grief that ensues. Ecocritics argue that ecological objects of loss abound--for instance, species are disappearing and landscapes are becoming increasingly compromised--and yet, such loss is often deemed "ungrievable." While humans regularly grieve human losses, we understand very little about how to genuinely grieve the loss of nonhuman being, natural environments, and ecological processes. My dissertation calls attention to our society's tendency to participate in superficial nature-nostalgia, rather than active and engaged environmental mourning, and ultimately activism. Herein, I investigate how an array of postwar and contemporary American novels represent a complex relationship between environmental degradation and mental illness. Literature, I suggest, is crucial to investigations of this problem because it can reveal the human consequences of ecological loss in a way that is unavailable to political, philosophical, scientific, and even psychological discourse.
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Taylor, Rebekah Ann. "Anthropocene Modernisms: Ecological Expressions of the "Human Age" in Eliot, Williams, Toomer, and Woolf." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1461270901.
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Zandi, Sophia. "Grotesque, Bodily, and Hydrous: The Liminal Landscapes of the Underworld In Homer, Virgil, and Dante." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1625864941501779.
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Moran, Benjamin Adam. "The Earthen Mirror: Spenser, Soil, and the Natures of Interpretation." The Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1594476712054021.
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Richey, Camille Kathryn. "Finnishness and Colonization in Akseli Gallen-Kallela's Representations of Africa." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2015. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/5571.
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Akseli Gallen-Kallela is often discussed as the national painter of Finland, as one who helped define Finnishness when Finland was still a colonized area of Russia. However, his trip to Africa from 1909-1911 shows where Gallen-Kallela acts as a pictorial colonizer himself, not only sympathizing with the Africans but representing them through a European cosmopolitan lens, as purer and closer to nature, but still inferior. The assumptions inherent in his representations of Africa reveal that Gallen-Kallela is not only a colonized subject but a colonizer of his own country.
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McGee, Katherine Marie. "Responsibility and Responsiveness in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley." Scholar Commons, 2014. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/5376.
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This dissertation looks at the ways in which humans interact with and respond to other humans and nonhumans in Ann Radcliffe's and Mary Shelley's novels. I argue that in light of the social and political turmoil surrounding the French Revolution, Radcliffe and Shelley call not so much for Revolution or drastic reform but for a change in the ways in which individuals respond to the needs of others, both human and nonhuman, and take responsibility for each other. The ways in which humans interact with the nonhuman inform the positive and negative practices that they should use to interact with other humans and vice versa.
Chapter One considers the connection between nature and culture in Radcliffe'sA Sicilian Romance, The Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian to argue that Radcliffe's "explained supernatural" occupies a liminal space between nature and culture. Furthermore, some of the upper class are able to discern that the "real," or material, supernatural does not exist while still acknowledging that some form of spiritual supernatural presence is possible, thus reflecting a heightened awareness of concepts beyond the material.
Chapter Two looks at Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian to argue that characters who are able to appreciate nature, particularly landscape, are more admirable than those who ignore it. Specifically, these characters indicate an openness to forming reciprocal relationships with the landscapes, allowing the views offered by the landscapes to offer them peace or comfort while simultaneously respecting the power the landscapes hold. Drawing from the theories of place theorists Tim Cresswell and Yi-Fu Tuan, this chapter posits that landscapes can be classified as being on the verge of place.
Chapter Three looks at Frankenstein and The Last Man to argue that Shelley demonstrates the types of reciprocal relationships people should form with both humans and nonhumans. Donna Haraway's idea of "contact zones"--places where the human and nonhuman can communicate--inform this reading of the relationships between the human and nonhuman in these two novels. It investigates how Victor Frankenstein and the creature define "human" and then asserts that in Frankenstein the creature cannot form a place for communication with any of the humans whose acceptance and companionship he seeks because no one is willing to do so. The Last Man's Lionel Verney, on the other hand, is able to form reciprocal relationships with both the human and the nonhuman, thus enabling him to ultimately become the "last man."
The fourth and final chapter looks at Shelley's Valperga, Lodore, and The Last Man, set in the past, present, and future, respectively, arguing that Shelley uses these different time settings in order to demonstrate that many of the struggles people have are similar to ones that others had in the past and will continue to have in the future if people do not adjust the ways in which they respond to disaster. By presenting readers with specifics about location and environment, Shelley creates settings that readers can connect to and then entertain the idea that these characters' struggles are like their own.
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Low, Matthew Michael. "Prairie survivance: language, narrative, and place-making in the American Midwest." Diss., University of Iowa, 2011. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/2572.
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The prairie ecosystem of the American Midwest has long been depicted as a "lost landscape." Two-hundred years of Euro-American settlement has degraded the ecological prairie through systematic removal of native grasses and forbs, replacement with nonnative and invasive plant species, disruption of longstanding disturbance regimes (such as prairie fires), and the fragmentation of ecosystem connectivity. The prairie's depiction in art, literature, history, politics, and our national environmental discourse, collectively referred to in this study as the "cultural prairie," has not fared much better. Beginning in the early nineteenth-century, explorers and soldiers, writers and artists, settlers and promoters perpetuated an image of the "vanishing prairie" in travel narratives prolifically published for consumption by a burgeoning American readership. As the "vanishing prairie" emerged as the accepted image of the prairie, narratives depicting its disappearance from the landscape became self-fulfilling prophecies. Language, and narrative in particular, thus contributed to the degradation of the ecological prairie.
Narratives of the "vanishing prairie" are characterized by what Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor terms "absence, nihility, and victimry." One remedy to these fatalistic narratives is Vizenor's notion of "survivance," which he defines as "an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories" ("Aesthetics of Survivance," in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor [Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008], 1). Though Vizenor uses the term survivance principally to recover the stories, traditions, and identities of Native American cultures from Euro-American "simulations of dominance," his critical inquiries are more broadly applicable to the exploitation of the environment by many of the same policies, agents, strategies, and technologies that were put to use to propagate and promote state-sponsored ideologies of uniformity, homogeneity, and monoculturalism throughout the American Midwest. "Prairie survivance" is thus an attempt to make the prairie a presence, not an absence, in mainstream environmental discourse and debate, including the study of American literature and the fields of environmental criticism (or ecocriticism), place studies, and cultural geography.
My argument begins with a critique of Euro-American travel narratives popularized throughout the nineteenth-century by the likes of Washington Irving, George Catlin, "Buffalo Bill" Cody, and others. These travel narratives perpetuated the trope of the "vanishing prairie" by employing stock images and narrative techniques, none more pervasive than the bison hunt. Specifically, the dramatic hunt sequences of these travel narratives reinforced the eradication of the bison from the ecological prairie. However, the consequences of these narratives are not limited to the time of their writing; instead, the "lost landscape" image of the prairie remains persistent to this day as a direct result of its misrepresentation in the travel literature of the nineteenth century. The second half of my argument entails a reading of counternarratives that envision a much different past, present, and future for the prairie. The bison's recovery in narratives by Luther Standing Bear, James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, and Mary Oliver is one example in which the fate of the prairie is not limited to its inevitable demise. Moreover, I have coined the term "aesthetics of restoration" to describe the prairie's presence in the work of Aldo Leopold, Paul Gruchow, Annie Proulx, and Linda Hogan (among others), each of whom overturns nihilistic images of the prairie as a "lost landscape" by writing about its restoration and permanent return to the landscapes of the American Midwest. Narrative's potential for healing is realized in these examples, a cornerstone of narrative ethics.
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Craft, Alexandria C. "Environmental Deterioration in Contemporary Appalachian Literature: A Biblical Ecocritical Analysis of Serena and Strange as This Weather Has Been." Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University, 2018. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3415.
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Ron Rash’s Serena and Ann Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been are two contemporary Appalachian novels that have yet to be analyzed from a biblical ecocritical perspective. While some literary scholars acknowledge the environmental aspects of the novels, little of their research goes beyond examining the land and its resources as commodities or metaphorical extensions for the characters. In this thesis, I elaborate on those interpretations by scrutinizing the natural descriptions in both novels and comparing those findings to some of the landscapes and environmental verses located within the Bible. Unlike the pastoral ideal found in a portion of the literature preceding the twentieth century, contemporary Appalachian writers such as Rash and Pancake have moved away from such a bucolic, prelapsarian idealization in favor of limning a more industrialized, postlapsarian Appalachia. Following both analyses, I conclude by predicting how emerging Appalachian writers will portray the landscape in future works.
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López-Vega, Martín. "Periferias emancipadas. Políticas de la representación espacial en la Iberia reimaginada." Diss., University of Iowa, 2017. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5556.
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This dissertation, Emancipated Peripheries. Politics of Spatial Representation in the Re-imagined Iberia, explores how the emergence of Basque, Galician and Asturian literatures has changed the web of relations between these literatures and the other consolidated Iberian literatures (Castilian, Portuguese, and Catalan), and how the coexistence of these literatures in the Iberian Peninsula forces us to re-conceptualize Iberian space as the place where the identity of a certain linguistic community is performed, understanding space in a performative way. This dissertation questions two predominant assumptions: first, that peripheral literatures are nothing but small imitations of national literatures, and that they follow the same paradigm at a minor scale, with minor achievements which are significant only in their own context. Second, that there is a centripetal center towards which every cultural movement tends to refer. I argue that peripheral Iberian literatures establish themselves as new interconnected centers of cultural production that are no longer dependent, but rather are inter-dependent, transforming the periphery into a privileged place for renovation and the formulation of new cultural proposals and tendencies. This reading of the Iberian context also invites a new reading of the Castilian canon, unearthing hidden masterpieces and alternative readings of the tradition. A post-colonial, ecocritical and biopolitical approach to these issues allows an in-depth understanding of what has been hidden: alternative conceptions of modernity, dissimilar readings of the literary canon, and the strong and concealed voices of the peripheral, the women, or the rural.
This dissertation examines how peripheral literatures (and among these I include a certain reading of the Castilian tradition) redefine the relation between the human and non-human, masculine and feminine, nature and culture (focusing on the poetry of the Galician poet Olga Novo); how they draw new symbolic maps of the Iberian literatures and their traditions (as the Asturian writer Xuan Bello does); how they recover the lost memory of certain communities (studying novels by Basque writer Iñigo Aranbarri and the Castilian novelist Julio Llamazares, as well as video installations by artists like Barbara Fluxá or Iván Cortázar); and how certain literary works propose a new web of relations between peripheries (analyzing the novels by the Portuguese writer Valter Hugo Mãe).
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van, Uitert Catherine Gardner Guyon. "Paradox and Paradise: Conflicting Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Nature in Aminata Sow Fall's Douceurs du bercail." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2010. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/2352.
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In my thesis, I examine Aminata Sow Fall's sixth novel Douceurs du bercail "The Sweetness of Home" through three lenses: race, gender, and nature. I analyze the way Sow Fall approaches each of these three areas in terms of paradox to emphasize her understanding of the complexity of these issues and her reluctance to outline them rigidly. Instead of putting forth hard opinions about how race, gender, or nature should be understood, Sow Fall exhibits a propensity to allow each area to remain complicated. I study why she allows racial, gendered, and environmental paradoxes to circulate around one another in her text rather than attempting to resolve them, concluding that she uses this strategy both as an organizing principle and as an invitation to her readers to question the extant theories surrounding these three issues. Sow Fall's use of language in all three areas signals an underlying fascination with the paradoxes inherent in each. In the chapter on race, I discuss the contrasting narrative styles Sow Fall uses to describe European airport officials versus the protagonist Asta's best friend, a French woman named Anne. Sow Fall's language is significant here because she contrasts two white Europeans, one characterized as systematic and cold, the other warm and open, respectively. I also discuss the way Sow Fall uses an informal and lethargic narrative voice to characterize a black secretary living in Senegal, further highlighting the disconnect between the two racial groups. In the chapter on feminism, I discuss a shift in Asta's language as she becomes more assertive. I also analyze the various aspects of femininity in Douceurs du bercail which have led some scholars to carry out feminist readings of the text, such as Asta's decision to leave her domineering and abusive husband, but recognize the more traditional aspects of the novel, such as Asta's marriage to Babou at Naatangué, as problematic to a purely feminist reading of the text. In the chapter on nature, I study Sow Fall's problematic use of Westernized language to describe the development of the untouched land of Naatangué into a lucrative farm. Throughout the chapters, I interpret Naatangué as the ultimate paradoxical space which is at once wrought with complicated language and conflicting ideals yet acts as a quasi-paradise where Asta and her friends balance the conflicting forces of tradition and modernity. Naatangué also acts as an organizing principle where all three areas of my study intersect.
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Rochester, Rachel. "Postcolonial Cli-Fi: Advocacy and the Novel Form in the Anthropocene." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/23736.
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Through the filters of postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and digital humanities, this project considers the capabilities and limitations of novels to galvanize action in response to environmental crises. My findings suggest that novels are well equipped to engage in environmental education, although some of the form’s conventions must be disrupted to fully capitalize upon its strengths. The modern novel is conventionally limited in scope, often resorts to apocalyptic narratives that can breed hopelessness, is dedicated to a form of realism that belies the dramatic weather events exacerbated by climate change, defers authority to a single voice, and is logocentric. By supplementing conventional novels with a variety of paratexts, including digital tools, scientific findings, non-fiction accounts of past, present, and future activism, and authorial biography, it is my contention that the novel’s potency as a pedagogical tool increases.
After addressing this project’s stakes and contexts in my Introduction, Chapter II assesses three South Asian novels in English that are concerned with sustainable development: Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. I conclude by considering how StoryMaps might further disrupt pro-sustainable development propaganda alongside more traditional novels. Chapter III examines how explicitly activist South Asian novelists construct authorial personae that propose additional solutions to the environmental problems identified in their novels, focusing on Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People. Chapter IV coins the term “locus-colonial novel,” a novel that decenters the human, situating place at the fulcrum of a work of historical fiction, using Hari Kunzru’s Gods without Men as one exemplar. I examine Kunzru’s novel alongside promotional materials for planned Mars missions to consider how narratives of colonialism on Earth might lead to a more socially and environmentally sustainable colonial model for Mars. Chapter V introduces the concept of a digital locus-colonial novel that allows users to develop informed, environmentally focused scenarios for colonial Mars. Through these chapters, this dissertation identifies specific rhetorical techniques that allow conscientious novels to create imaginative spaces where readers might explore solutions to the social, economic, and increasingly environmental problems facing human populations worldwide.
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Jackson, Lisa Marie. "Ocean views: women's transnational modernism in fiction by Elizabeth Bowen, Hagar Olsson, and Katherine Mansfield." Diss., University of Iowa, 2018. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6595.
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This study examines the modernist fiction by three transnational women writers who turned to the ocean in their writing during the first half of the twentieth century to navigate their divided or hyphenated national identities. The Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), the Finland-Swedish author Hagar Olsson (1893-1978), and the New Zealand short story writer of English descent, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), use ocean space in their fiction, in the form of both sea imagery and material seascape settings, to unsettle ideologically limiting and culturally anchored categories of identity, gender, class, place and time. The modernist aesthetics and marginal ethics of these white colonial women who existed at a slant to the geographical and cultural center of the British, masculine metropolis pivot on two competing ocean views. First, the sea features in their work as a historically compliant, smooth surface in the service of the establishment, enabling and justifying imperial expansion and colonial settlement, as well as defining and patrolling the uncompromising borders of the land-based modern nation state. Alternately, the ocean comes to disrupt progressive imperial models of history, to inspire fluid and transgressive ideologies, to bear witness to violent histories submerged by official records, and to confound our sense of scale and chronological time through outsized subterranean ecologies that blur the line between land and water, and, as a consequence, throw into question larger fundamental, ontological distinctions, such as that between the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human,’ or ‘more-than-human.’ By bringing postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives to bear on Bowen, Mansfield and Olsson’s literary representations of the ocean, my study contributes to the current expanding reach of modernist studies, ushering into the critical spotlight global regions previously overlooked and misfit writers traditionally dismissed, to locate that which modernity originally defined itself against at the vibrant heart of that construction.
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Davis, Megan S. "A R(EVOLUTION) OF ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: YOUNG-ADULT DYSTOPIAN FICTION AS A VEHICLE FOR ECOCRITICAL AWARENESS." CSUSB ScholarWorks, 2019. https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/787.
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Prominent within various scientific journals, news media outlets, and online publications are conversations surrounding what is dubbed “climate anxiety.” This wide-stemmed social unrest is caused, in large part, by the unrelenting, consistent data from the scientific community reporting rising sea levels, species extinction, and “record-breaking” heatwaves as well as an increasing average of global temperatures, that seem to top the next every year for the past decade. However, an underlying thread to these reports remains largely consistent. Unless serious regard is given to our natural surroundings and how we have come to interact within it, regions of the Earth considered desirable for human life will likely become uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable to humans and other species. When addressed so simply and plainly, it seems that the response to such life-altering implications ought to be simple: do whatever it takes to ensure that a diversity of life, including that of humankind, can continue on the planet Earth. Voices of the scientific community have decreed that a driving force behind the lackadaisical approach to deterring such dire climatological circumstances, is the inability to grasp the immense scope of climate change issues.
This thesis, then, aims at proposing a directive to correct this problematic mentality, and a specific generation to combat this nature. Using the lens of ecocriticism, the study of literature and the environment, combined with cutting-edge theoretical findings in the field, I will focus on the literary portrayal of climate change within young-adult dystopian fiction.
While regarding the scholarship on the recent increase of YA fiction that takes a critical approach to human ethics and the portrayal of the demise of the natural environment in those texts, I will examine how this trend responds to my ideas of young-adult fiction functioning within Ecocriticism. Moreover, you will see a pattern charting how literature can revolutionize and evolve the mind frame of human ethics on a planetary scale, starting with the young adult readers. Further, I will highlight how these ideologies could and ought to be incorporated into a composition classroom. Composition already has a strong history of grounding itself in the notion of identity, and how contingent factors (social, political, economic, ecological, etc.) are integrated into the construction of that identity. This thesis poses that if we can introduce a sense of how those factors affect our ability to act in the natural world and potential consequences of these actions by way of pop culture outlets like YA Climate Fiction, readers can begin to re-shape our identities and actions, individually and collectively, towards Ecocritical ethics and awareness.
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Johnson, Eleanore. "Ill at ease in our translated world ecocriticism, language, and the natural environment in the fiction of Michael Ondaatje, Amitav Ghosh, David Malouf and Wilma Stockenström." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002277.
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This thesis explores the thematic desire to establish an ecological human bond with nature in four contemporary novels: The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, An Imaginary Life by David Malouf, and The Expedition to The Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenström. These authors share a concern with the influence that language has on human perception, and one of the most significant ways they attempt to connect with the natural world is through somehow escaping, or transcending, what they perceive to be the divisive tendencies of language. They all suggest that human perception is not steered entirely by a disembodied mind, which constructs reality through linguistic and cultural lenses, but is equally influenced by physical circumstances and embodied experiences. They explore the potential of corporeal reciprocity and empathy as that which enables understanding across cultural barriers, and a sense of ecologically intertwined kinship with nature. They all struggle to reconcile their awareness of the potential danger of relating to nature exclusively through language, with a desire to speak for the natural world in literature. I have examined whether they succeed in doing so, or whether they contradict their thematic suspicion of language with their literary medium. I have prioritised a close ecocritical reading of the novels and loosely situated the authors’ approach to nature and language within the broad theoretical frameworks of radical ecology, structuralism and poststructuralism. I suggest that these novels are best analysed in the context of an ecocritical mediation between poststructuralist conceptions of nature as inaccessible cultural construct, and the naïve conception of unmediated, pre-reflective interaction with the natural world. I draw especially on the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose insistence that perception is always both embodied and culturally mediated truly renders culture and nature irreducible, intertwined categories. By challenging historical dualisms like mind/body and culture/nature, the selected novels suggest a more fluid and discursive understanding of the perceived conflict between language and nature, whilst problematizing the perception of language as merely a cultural artefact. Moreover, they are examples of the kind of literature that has the potential to positively influence our human conception of nature, and adapt us better to our ecological context on a planet struggling for survival.
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Traub, Courtney Anne. "Romanticising crisis : digital revolution and ecological risk in late postmodern American fiction." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:adb4eb33-9053-402c-8322-bd55c915077f.
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This thesis probes how recent experimental American "crisis fictions" from authors including Mark Z. Danielewski, Kathryn Davis, and Evan Dara reformulate transatlantic Romantic literary debates about technological and environmental change. Arguing that such texts extend previously theorised ties between Romanticism and postmodernism, it identifies enduring ties between late-postmodern accounts of crisis and those of Romantic predecessors. Responding to the upheavals of digital revolution and ecological risks, these texts, published between 1995 and 2012, inventively engage several linchpin constructs in transatlantic Romantic writing: chiefly, the imagined supersession of subjective and temporal boundaries; a sense that the natural and non-human world is of crucial importance; and a reliance on idioms of sublimity to suggest the unrepresentability of the aforementioned crises. Although numerous critics have traced similarities between Romantic and postmodern modes, this thesis considers those resonances as deeper questions of cultural and literary history. It proposes to more carefully historicise the Romantic intellectual heritage in late postmodernism, identifying intermediating moments that inform contemporary accounts of crisis. It unearths how late postmodern technocultural and environmentalist imaginaries were always already Romantic. Deeply informed by countercultural, mid-century American movements and ideas that themselves drew significantly from transatlantic Romanticism, contemporary figurations of upheaval, syncretically figured in mid-century publications such as the Whole Earth Catalog, are indebted to both Romantic and neo-Romantic heritages. This thesis additionally argues that the digital revolution and unprecedented environmental crisis act as pressures on postmodern literary practices from the mid-1990s onward. Digital speeding and a looming sense of ecological risk register as even earlier crises than the terrorist attacks of "9-11", requiring a recalibration of what the postmodern might mean and do. Crucially, in their preoccupation with embodied realities and environments, including natural ones, the contemporary narratives examined here diverge from the assumption that the natural world bears little importance in postmodern fields of representation. Finally, many recent literary experiments figure themselves as materially participating in the technological and medial systems they respond to; formal experimentation is, accordingly, another centre of interest. This research examines how select texts deploy formal strategies to "materially instantiate" Romantic ideas, to borrow Katherine Hayles's term. Although numerous critics have suggested that Romantic discourse permeates digital cultural imaginaries, existing scholarship devotes little attention to how formal experimentation intersects with narrative strategies.
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Ray, Sarah Jaquette 1976. "The ecological other: Indians, invalids, and immigrants in U.S. environmental thought and literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10352.
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xi, 233 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.This dissertation argues that a fundamental paradox underlies U.S. environmentalism: even as it functions as a critique of dominant social and economic practices, environmentalism simultaneously reinforces many social hierarchies, especially with regard to race, immigration, and disability, despite its claims to recognize the interdependence of human and ecological well-being. This project addresses the related questions: In what ways does environmentalism--as a code of behavioral imperatives and as a set of rhetorical strategies--ironically play a role in the exploitation of land and communities? Along what lines--class, race, ability, gender, nationality, age, and even "sense of place"--do these environmental codes and discourses delineate good and bad environmental behavior? I contend that environmentalism emerged in part to help legitimize U.S. imperial ambitions and support racialized and patriarchal conceptions of national identity. Concern about "the environment" made anxieties about communities of color more palatable than overt racism. Furthermore, "environmentalism's hidden attachments" to whiteness and Manifest Destiny historically aligned the movement with other repressive ideologies, such as eugenics and strict anti-immigration. These "hidden attachments" exist today, yet few have analyzed their contemporary implications, a gap this project fills. In three chapters, I detail nineteenth-century environmentalism's influence on contemporary environmental thought. Each of these three illustrative chapters investigates a distinct category of environmentalism's "ecological others": Native Americans, people with disabilities, and undocumented immigrants. I argue that environmentalism defines these groups as "ecological others" because they are viewed as threats to nature and to the American national body politic. The first illustrative chapter analyzes Native American land claims in Leslie Marmon Silko's 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead . The second illustrative chapter examines the importance of the fit body in environmental literature and U.S. adventure culture. In the third illustrative chapter, I integrate literary analysis with geographical theories and methods to investigate national security, wilderness protection, and undocumented immigration in the borderland. In a concluding fourth chapter, I analyze works of members of the excluded groups discussed in the first three chapters to show how they transform mainstream environmentalism to bridge social justice and ecological concerns. This dissertation contains previously published material.
Committee in charge: Shari Huhndorf, Chairperson, English; Louise Westling, Member, English; David Vazquez, Member, English; Juanita Sundberg, Member, Not from U of 0 Susan Hardwick, Outside Member, Geography
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Speranza, Monica. "Information Overload: Reading Information-as-Waste in Contemporary Canadian Literature." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/42341.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis investigates three contemporary Canadian texts— Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Rita Wong’s forage—that treat information as an object that can be wasted and recuperated. Using information theory and a new sub-field of critical waste theory called “Discard Studies,” I explore how the authors studied in this thesis place these two lines of thought alongside one another to examine how the concept of recycling information challenges the material, cultural, and ideological structures that distance humans from their waste. Specifically, I read the event of recycling as an interruptive act that triggers a reassessment of the (im)material connections that tether humans to their waste, vast (inter)national networks of exchange, and environmental crises related to our garbage.