This thesis examines the presence of unhu, a process of becoming and remaining human through community ties, in Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Dangarembga interrogates corrupt versions of community by creating positive examples of unhu that alternatively foster community building. Utilizing ecocritical, utopian, and postcolonial methodologies, this thesis postulates that these novels stress the importance of retaining a traditional concept like unhu while also acknowledging the need to adjust it over time to ensure its vitality. Both novels depict the creativity and resilience of unhu amid toxic surroundings.

In Recreating Nature: Ecocritical Readings of Yosemite and Grand Canyon, I examine the intersections of culture and nature in two prominent national parks, and I consider the implications of nature-tourism in the environmental discourse of the U.S. Covering a period from 1848 to the present, my project aims to correct an oversight in scholarship about the park system, in which legacies of colonialism and imperialism--when addressed at all--tend to be historicized and framed as the age-old sins of a presumably reformed national politic. Instead, I examine both historical and present-day developments, emphasizing the profound cultural influence of the places we designate as natural. I define ecocriticism as an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor attuned to the interconnectedness of things. My methodology is to engage texts, images and other expressions of the national parks in a process of extended close reading and comparative analysis. While observing the particular contexts of each case, I attempt to locate these texts amidst the broadest but most essential critical terrain: they each negotiate a dialogical relationship between culture and nature. By setting the stage for examining the human and its relation to the non-human other, the parks have become key sites for displaying the recreation of nature. After my introduction I discuss John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra, focusing on an episode where Muir risks his life for a view from Yosemite Falls. I also consider Muir's failure to empathize with Native Americans he encountered. In my next chapter I analyze John Wesley Powell's Exploration by focusing on his attempt to assert authority over a region by prioritizing the scientific tone in his writing. Next I synthesize historical and contemporary sources, discussing Mary Colter's Grand Canyon architecture alongside the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a glass-bottom walkway on the Hualapai Indian reservation. In the following chapter I compare the acrophobia-inducing photographs of George Fiske and Emery Kolb. Finally, I discuss transit real and imagined in Grand Canyon and Yosemite, considering the utopian potential of national parks. I close by revisiting questions about our changing environmental discourse and about the future of ecocriticism.

The early twentieth century saw the beginning of modern environmentalism. Intellectuals dreamed up solutions to the world’s problems and hoped for a better future being made possible by advances in science and technology. However, Aldous Huxley produced Brave New World which, as this essay argues, mocks the enthusiasm of his intellectual peers. The dystopian novel depicts a future in which technology dehumanizes the population, and uses a great deal of animal imagery to make this point. This essay analyses the use of animal imagery from an ecocritical perspective arguing that the “pathetic fallacy” is reversed. By examining the use of biotechnology and central planning in the novel, and applying the ecocritical perspective that humanity and nature are part of a whole, this essay argues that society resembles a farm for human animals, which is partly expressed by Huxley’s use of the image of a bee colony. The argument is presented that Huxley satirizes his environmentally concerned peers by depicting a totalitarian state which, though unconcerned with environmental issues, echoes the eco-fascist methods proposed by the author’s friends and family.

This dissertation builds upon the relatively young fields of visual and environmental rhetoric and analyzes the rhetoric of natural history filmmaking, focusing on the ways in which the genre illustrates the complex relationship between contemporary culture and the environment. Each text demonstrates how the constructs of “nature” and “wilderness” perform necessary cultural work by representing particular ideals that change to meet the public’s shifting needs. Nature performs various roles, serving as a source of knowledge, solace, wonder, mystery, anxiety, truth, identity, and affirmation. The dominance and immediacy of visual culture make the natural history film, along with advertising, one of the most significant sources of meaning regarding the natural world. These films employ familiar syntactic and semantic cues such as sentimental parent/offspring interactions, authoritative narration that limits the ability of the audience to interpret freely, and a musical score that influences the viewer’s emotional response to certain scenes. The net result of these rhetorical practices is a distancing of the viewer from the natural world that destabilizes the attempts of many eco-political programs to emphasize the interconnectedness of ecological systems and their components. The emergent genre of big-budget nature films (BBNFs) is a distinctly modern and extremely popular take on natural history filmmaking that has more in common with summer blockbusters and wildlife theme parks than its predecessors with an unprecedented ability to influence public perception of the natural world. Even as environmental concerns become increasingly dire, the BBNF tends to commodify death and extinction, avoid political engagement, reduce engagement with nature to its most sentimental and violent moments, perpetuate the perceived separation between humans and their environment, and provide a soothing escape to a virtual environment that too often seems unaffected by climate change and habitat destruction. The BBNF has the potential to undermine environmental and conservation efforts. It also exemplifies what some ecocritics have termed “ecopornography,” an exploitative representation that objectifies its subjects, encourages viewers to develop identifications with unrealistic images rather than their real-world analogs, and helps enable unethical behavior toward the environment and nonhuman animals. At stake in this dissertation is a deeper understanding of how natural history filmmaking affects the public’s awareness of (and role in) the environment.

No description available.

<p>"The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions," writes Thoreau: "Let us spend our lives in conceiving then." This dissertation depicts how Thoreau's fellow antebellum antislavery writers discerned the power of concepts to shape "the universe." Wishing for a new universe, one free of slavery, they spent their lives crafting new concepts. "Ground Plans" argues that antebellum antislavery writers confiscated the concept of nature from proslavery forces and fundamentally redefined it. Advocates of slavery routinely rationalized slave society by referencing a particular conception of nature--as static, transhistorical, and hierarchical--claiming that slavery simply mirrored the natural, permanent racial order. This dissertation demonstrates that to combat slavery's claim to naturalness, antislavery writers reconceptualized nature as composed of dynamic species and races, evolving in relation to one another. In four chapters on David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and Gerrit Smith, it shows that this theory of nature enabled these writers to argue for the complete transformation of society to bring it into line with what they characterized as nature's true principles. This dissertation thus restores the concept of nature as a crucial intellectual battleground for abolitionism. Moreover, it shows these politically-charged antebellum debates over nature's meaning to be crucial to the story of natural science, showing that abolitionists speculated on the natural principles that would eventually constitute the founding insights of ecology.</p> / Dissertation

Although nature is a dominant presence both in historical New Zealand literature and in New Zealand's current international image, literary critics observe a tendency on the part of young writers to neglect nature in favour of more human, urban and cultural themes. I write against this perception, basing my argument on the hypothesis that such urban-based literature may in fact be centrally concerned with the natural world and with human-nature relations. In locating nature within the urban fictional environment, I demonstrate a model of analysis that extends literary critical approaches to nature both within New Zealand literature and within the field of ecocriticism, both of which are largely consumed with analysing representations of sublime, non-urban nature. I test this urban ecocritical method of reading in my analysis of Catherine Chidgey's three novels, In a Fishbone Church, Golden Deeds and The Transformation, all of which adhere to the human-centred trend typical of contemporary New Zealand novels. I reveal within Chidgey's fiction a gradual progression away from archetypal representations of the sublime toward a more complex, fractured and rebellious variety of nature that co-exists alongside humans within urban space. Thus, while the characters in her first novel predominantly interact with nature as a sublime, non-urban entity, those in her second and third novels face the daily possibility of encountering "the wild" within domesticated settings that are apparently severed from any connection with the natural world. This kind of urbanised feral nature poses a significant threat to Chidgey's characters, overtly in the form of the powerful natural elements, and covertly through the myriad varieties of transformed nature with which they surround themselves. I read this portrayal of nature as a commentary on contemporary modernity's relationship with the natural environment, and I suggest that this kind of agentive, autonomous nature demands a new theory of environmentalism which will consider nature as an actor alongside humans.

Society’s current experience of nature is ambiguous. Just as nature proves severely affected by human activities and vulnerable, it also appears threatening to us. Although the changes in nature have been perceived for long as an ecological crisis, this experience and the challenges it provides have remained persistently exigent over the last four decades. As a consequence, our epistemological understanding of nature and culture as separate entities has been inherently shaken. My study is located among ecocritical attempts to negotiate these experiences. Immanent critiques of E. O. Wilson’s and Bruno Latour’s epistemologies exemplify how we cannot escape the dualism in society’s relationship to nature by simply declaring nature’s and culture’s unity. Relying on the social philosophy of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, I instead consider the dualism as historically both true and false, and argue that instrumental reason provides a socio-psychological barrier to transcending the way Western society relates to nature. Central to the situation’s perpetuation is the confidence that the object of knowledge can be adequately and steadily identified in knowledge. Based on Adorno’s negative dialectics, I develop a model of cognition that works through the dualism within the knowing subject and in its relation to animals. This model is substantiated in the context of Enlightenment thought. A reconstruction of the development of René Descartes’ (1596–1650) epistemology in relation to his philosophy of nature and the place of animals within it shows the animal as particularly resistant to Descartes’ conceptual identification. In the writings on animal behaviour of Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) this resistance further manifests as a self-mediation of animals, which denotes the limits to their conceptual assimilation. Maria Sibylla Merian’s (1647–1717) aesthetically mediated insect studies capture this tension between species commonalities and unique particularities, and represent the single specimens as nonidentical individuals. Through critical engagement with these works, my study develops a cognitive approach to nature that preserves its object as qualitatively mediated between universal and particular properties, and inherently nonidentical. Simultaneously, it recovers the animal as an object of knowledge particularly resistant to identificatory thought. Consolidating these two insights, aesthetic mediation of animals provides an experience that reveals to the subject its limited power over the objects and which is capable of raising the memory of nature within the subject.

Access to abstract restricted until 07/2016. / Eco-typology and the tree of life in Milton's Paradise lost -- The Matthew Bible, eco-typology and the tree of life in Milton's Eden -- The Geneva Bible, eco-typology and the fruit of the living word in Paradise lost -- Speed's 'Genealogies', the King James Bible and the seed of grace in the later books of Paradise lost. / Department of English

Rabbit Lake explores the concerns of citizens who testified at hearings held by the Rabbit Lake Uranium Mine Environmental Assessment Panel throughout Saskatchewan in 1993. The poems that form my thesis are both lyrical and experimental, derived in part from the voices found in the Rabbit Lake transcripts. Inspired by rhizome theory and rhizomorphous structures, the voices in my thesis are nomadic: their primary impulse is to map interconnected histories and geographies; in so doing, these voices transcend boundaries and coalesce to form a polyphonic, non-linear narrative. The influence of ecocritical theory is reflected in poems that draw the reader’s attention to the non-human world affected by uranium mining, most notably in an interspersed series of experiments detailing various forms of lichen found throughout Saskatchewan. Various other textual experiments, including collage and erasure, are lines of flight within the rhizome of the thesis. The inclusion of “(inaudible)” passages found in the transcripts is intended to draw the reader’s attention toward what was misheard or left unsaid at the hearings. The presence of an “unknown” speaker is designed as a poetic and political intervention that enables elaborations. Beginning with Canada’s historical involvement in the Manhattan Project, that is, the United States’ earliest attempt to build a nuclear weapon, my thesis moves from Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, and into the lakes and waterways of Saskatchewan’s north. The voices that emerge, situated in association with lakes and rivers, include a chorus of women and a chorus of Indigenous elders, an invented uranium mining corporation, “Uraneco,” and several scientists, including a biologist and geophysicist, as well as an invented cosmochemist and limnologist. From Saskatchewan’s northern waterways, the voices wander outward, evoking sites affected by the nuclear industry beyond Saskatchewan’s borders, from crops in the province’s south historically affected by fallout from nuclear weapons’ testing in Nevada, to radioactive detritus left in the deserts of Iraq due the United States’ use of depleted Canadian uranium in munitions. The intention behind this figurative explosion of the thesis is to illustrate the extent to which a seemingly isolated uranium mine may affect the whole world.