Browsing by Subject "Ecocriticism"
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Item Calvino’s posthuman journey : a posthuman and ecocritical analysis of three works by Italo Calvino(2021-07-29) Gaglio, Samuel D.; Raffa, Guy P.; Bonifazio, Paola; Carter, Daniela; Iovino, SerenellaThis dissertation offers a posthuman and ecocritical analysis of three works – Marcovaldo, Palomar, and Le cosmicomiche by Italian writer Italo Calvino. It explores the potential of moving beyond anthropocentricism and into a hybrid space in which human and nonhuman life coexist and collaborate. The urban center is a significant place of this convergence. Underlying these novels is Calvino’s prescient concern for global industrialization, consumerism, and climate change. Posthumanism and ecocriticism overlap in their desire to combat these ongoing environmental crises onset by rapid human development in the 20th century. The omnipresence of animals in these stories also highlight Calvino’s resistance to see humans as an exceptional planetary species. By giving voice, thoughts, and agency to these animals, Calvino’s novels shift the hierarchy into a decentered space in which humans are not considered special or unique. Posthumanism reinforces this position.Item An ecocritical study of William Carlos Williams, James Agee, and Stephen Crane by way of the visual arts(2005) Ralph, Iris; Bremen, Brian A.My dissertation addresses the ways in which formal aesthetic strategies in literature and art in the period of modernism, approximately 1890-1940, make visible, and problematize the relation between language and environment. Stephen Crane (1871- 1900), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), and James Agee (1909-1955) avail themselves of contemporary, avant-garde visual arts and artists toward expressing the modernist collapse of faith in the adequacy of representation. Concomitantly, their writings articulate a post-Enlightenment empirical but anti-rationalist and a post- Enlightenment anti-romantic conviction that language is not divorced from but is already part of the existing furniture of the world. I locate this conviction in a Franciscan philosophical and epistemological tradition, one that scholars have duly remarked upon but with characteristic omission of its rich ecological tenets. For Crane and Williams, the existing and extensive contextual inquiry of the influence of the visual arts provides by way of analogy a useful terminology for exploring this early and high modernist writer’s aesthetic ambitions. My work contributes to and extends the contextual inquiry by addressing the ways in which Crane’s and Williams’s responses to the visual and graphic viii arts evidence not only the modernist grappling with the problem of representation per se but the confrontation with representation as this concerns the writing of the non-human subject-object figure by the human subject-object figure. The first chapters of the dissertation focus on the ecological avatar of St. Francis, and on Williams’s responses to cubist, precisionist, and dada art, and the quasi-landscapes of the High Renaissance Northern European painter Pieter Bruegel (the Elder). The final chapter looks back to the late nineteenth century, to impressionist painting and Stephen Crane, a writer who borrows from this painting the antithetical devices of flatness and atmosphere in ways that put into question normative distinctions between the human subject being and the non-human, so-called object being. The subject of the middle, sixth chapter is straight photography as this representational realist practice critically informs Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I argue that Agee’s encomium to, and excoriation of straight photography, a formidable tool of twenties and thirties documentary expression, implicitly ecocritically attacks the anthropocentric lens.Item Elegiac adaptations : resisting the closure of mourning in Elizabeth Robinson's Three Novels(2015-05) Cirit, Dilara Safiye; MacKay, Carol Hanbery; Bennett, ChadElizabeth Robinson's Three Novels (2011) is a lyric re-exploration of three Victorian novels: Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868) and The Woman in White (1859-60), and George Gissing's Eve's Ransom (1895). Robinson ostensibly wrote the poems as an elegy for her father; however, Three Novels also unearths elegiac aspects of its source novels that have been previously unexamined by critics. Each of the Victorian source novels narrates a movement from an initial loss toward an eventual resolution, mirroring the traditional structure of an elegy: mourning is ultimately completed by the acceptance of a compensatory substitute for the loss. While the poetry in Three Novels emphasizes the presence of elegy in its sources, the poems themselves fracture the practice of normative mourning by rewriting these novels in the style of Jahan Ramazani's melancholic "anti-elegy" which forecloses the possibility of loss resolution. Because the loss is not neatly resolved, it becomes an object of focus. Reading the anti-elegy manifest in Three Novels creates a space to mourn the losses incurred by each novel, thereby recuperating the overlooked figures of the female, the landscape, and the self that had been diminished by the narrative's drive to resolution.Item "Other than human forces" : Virginia Woolf’s moments of posthumanist being(2016-05-25) Senzaki, Sierra Miyone; Baker, Samuel, 1968-; Carter, MiaHow are we affected by “other than human forces”? Drawing on ecocriticism, posthumanism, and New Materialism, I ask what new understandings of Virginia Woolf become visible when we allow ourselves to blend together humanist knowledge categories such as “nature” and “culture” and attend to sensation and emotion. This project grounds itself in Woolf’s descriptions of interactions between the human and nonhuman in “A Sketch of the Past,” tracing the two types of interactions that emerge: posthumanist moments of being, which are vivid encounters between the fleshy self and its material surroundings, and humanist moments of non-being, in which the human utilizes the nonhuman as a tool to subdue emotion. Woolf’s theorization of these moments – read with an emphasis on embodied experience, the natural, and the presence or absence of division between the human and nonhuman – largely guides my own thinking. I then turn to an earlier novel, To the Lighthouse, in order to demonstrate that these interactions are not limited to “Sketch” or to Woolf’s own life. Rather, they reveal a dual sensibility towards the natural that pervades Woolf’s life and work. Ultimately, a posthumanist reading of Woolf illuminates how Woolf thinks carefully about human interactions with the natural and also allows us to refine our own thinking about the world in which we are enmeshedItem Queer ecopoetics : contemporary American poetry in these scandals of time(2022-09-16) Train, Emma Juliette; Bennett, Chad, 1976-; Houser, Heather; Kafer, Alison; Ronda, MargaretThis dissertation establishes the urgent political stakes of reading environmental poetry through queer epistemologies. The heteronormative visions of future life that often tacitly shape how we read environmental poems rely on patriarchal logics that offer limited resources for an ethics of living in our precarious material present. I argue that queer poets offer a rich archive for theorizing alternatives to these normative models of time and of anthropocentric life. In constellating the three discourses that animate my dissertation (ecocriticism, queer studies, and poetic theory) around shared theoretical questions regarding futurity, reproduction, and beyond-human relationality, I illustrate how contemporary environmental discourses regarding human reproduction and (non)human futures cannot be extricated from anti-racist and feminist interrogations of gender and sexuality. Through theoretically-situated close readings of formally-inventive poems, I articulate the significance of experimental and mixed-genre verse to a long history of American postwar ecopoetry. Contemporary queer poets use these experimental forms and structures, I argue, to reconceptualize time (as well as what it means to be human) by producing capacious models of agency and voice.Item Re-imagining environmental waste : an ecocritical reading of contemporary African women writers(2018-05-02) Fawaz, Yasmina; Wettlaufer, Alexandra; Tissières, Hélène; Tchumkam, Hervé; Brower, Benjamin; Picherit, HervéThe field of ecocriticism has been growing rapidly since its beginnings in the early 1990s. Since then, critics like Elizabeth Deloughrey and Byron Caminero-Santangelo have indicated the importance of considering African works and their postcolonial contexts in these inquiries, as well as the remaining need to engage with francophone parts of the continent. With a growing interest in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism galvanized by the increasing environmental disasters across the African continent and the globe, contemporary women writers Ananda Devi, Tanella Boni and Fatou Diome offer invaluable perspectives on the various forms of environmental waste as they consider some of the myriad connections between material, human and cultural elements of pollution and degradation. Through the study of three novels, Devi’s Eve de ses décombres (2006), Boni’s Les baigneurs du lac Rose (1995), and Fatou Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique (2003), this project articulates the ways in which these African writers go beyond portrayals of exploitation and waste by re-imagining polluted landscapes and gesture instead to the continent’s potential for material and cultural renewal.