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1	Enchanting Irruptions : Wonder, Noir, and the Environmental Imaginary Palmer, Ryan January 2017 (has links) This thesis investigates narratives of re-enchantment and disenchantment in three contemporary U.S. novels, Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in Paradise, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Drawing on key concepts from ecocritcism and affect theory, I argue that these novels interrogate narratives and affects associated with questions central to the Anthropocene: climate-related dilemmas, questions of environmental justice, and animal ethics. Situating these texts in relation to environmental discourses, I show how affects of wonder and re-enchantment are produced within them through the insertion of anti-mimetic narrative objects into otherwise representationally realistic fictional worlds. These incursions, and the affective shifts they produce, challenge and interrupt in the novels narratives of ecological dread and disenchantment, which I link to the techniques and affects of noir. In each chapter of this study, I show how the dialogical interplay between disenchantment and re-enchantment disrupts preconceptions and assumptions about aspects of ecological crisis, and engenders or reinforces political commitments to environmentally related issues. Chapter One focuses on interspecies politics and animal rights in Mermaids in Paradise, environmental justice is central to the analysis of Tropic of Orange in Chapter Two, and the political dynamics of countercultural environmentalism inform my reading of Inherent Vice in Chapter Three. Throughout, I explore the potential of re-enchantment to suggest an alternative to disenchanted and apocalyptic narratives concerning the environment, and to articulate a productive politics for contemporary ecofiction. Ecocriticism ecofiction re-enchantment wonder disenchantment noir environmental ethics climate change affect environmental justice Thomas Pynchon Lydia Millet Karen Tei Yamashita Languages and Literature Språk och litteratur
2	Ethical Wondering in Contemporary African American and Asian American Women's Magical Realism Na Rim Kim (16501845) 07 July 2023 (has links) <p>The term magical realism traces back to the German art critic Franz Roh, who in the early twentieth century applied it to (visual) art expressing the wondrousness of life. However, this definition has been eclipsed over time. Reorienting critical attention back to magical realism as the art of portraying wonder and wondering, I explore the magical realist novels of contemporary African American and Asian American women writers. Specifically, I examine Toni Morrison’s <em>Paradise</em> (1997), Jesmyn Ward’s <em>Sing, Unburied, Sing</em> (2017), Karen Tei Yamashita’s <em>Through the Arc of the Rain Forest</em> (1990), and Ruth Ozeki’s <em>A Tale for the Time Being</em> (2013). In wonder, all frames of reference at hand suddenly become inadequate. Simultaneously, the subject’s interest is heightened. As such, the act/experience of wondering may lead to humility and respect, the two attitudes at the base of any ethically flourishing life—a life that flourishes <em>with</em> others. For this reason, the Asian American woman writer and peace activist Maxine Hong Kingston espoused wondering. Affiliated with groups marginalized within the US, like Kingston my writers also promote wonder. I examine how these writers, through compelling use of both content and form, guide their readers toward a particular kind of wondering: wondering with an awareness of how the act/experience might lead to ethical flourishing.</p> Cultural theory Comparative and transnational literature Ecocriticism Literary theory North American literature Stylistics and textual analysis Epistemology Ethical theory Phenomenology Magical Realism Wonder Ethics African American Women's Literature Asian American Women's Literature Contemporary Literature Maxine Hong Kingston Toni Morrison Jesmyn Ward Karen Tei Yamashita Ruth Ozeki Paradise Sing, Unburied, Sing Through the Arc of the Rain Forest A Tale for the Time Being

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Enchanting Irruptions : Wonder, Noir, and the Environmental Imaginary

Ethical Wondering in Contemporary African American and Asian American Women's Magical Realism