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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.

This dissertation examines contemporary American novelists whose depictions of how humans relate to the natural world challenge dominant Western cultural assumptions about human autonomy. My analysis centers on Marilynne Robinson, Louise Erdrich, and Richard Powers. Scholarship has largely understood these writers to be undertaking human-centered, social projects related to gender, ethnicity, and technology. However, in my reading, their works demonstrate how the formal elements of fiction—character and plot development, narrative voice and perspective, and recurring imagery—can be used to develop what I call a coextensive vision of the environment, one which shifts emphasis from the autonomous human self to a perception of how embodied individuals are embedded in larger networks and interchanges. In developing this claim, I suggest the environmental potential of the novel, a genre that has received short shrift in ecocriticism. Chapter One considers the novels of Marilynne Robinson, focusing on Housekeeping. Robinson’s nature imagery is highly metaphorical, but I argue that her writing also works on what we might call a material register: it persistently gestures toward an external world that resists enclosure through language, a natural world with which the human body is entangled. Accordingly, I argue, Robinson’s work develops an ecological vision wherein humans are coextensive with the environment. Chapter Two centers on Louise Erdrich’s boundary imagery. I first explore the recurrence of imagery of harmful divisions across Erdrich’s whole body of work. This is, I contend, a pattern that Erdrich uses to critique radical individualism. I further argue that Erdrich draws on the traditional trickster of Anishinaabe storytelling to reinvigorate coextensive connections through pleasure and humor, generating a tribal kincentric ecology emphasizing reciprocity between interrelated beings. Chapter Three closes the project by reading Richard Powers, whose work offers a more frightening vision of what it means to be inseparable from nature compared with Robinson and Erdrich: in Gain, the primary link between humans and environment involves shared toxicity. I explore how Powers’s preferred two-stranded narrative structure develops the reader’s ecological awareness. However, I propose, Gain ultimately problematizes the ethical promise of interconnection, suggesting that knowledge of coextension spurs negative affect and disengagement. / 2020-02-14T00:00:00Z

The dissertation component of this Master’s degree explores the animist ethic in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness; more specifically it will examine how an animist cosmology underlies many of the ethical values in the text in particular those that guide an alternative to the globalising forces of capitalism through a co-operative, eco-friendly solution. By paying attention to the features in the text that could be called animist, in other words the interaction with non-human persons including plants, animals, geological features and ancestral spirits, this dissertation argues that these features are central to the transformation of the protagonist. Camagu’s journey involves a search for belonging that leads him into a network of relationships in Qolorha-By-Sea, which he can only navigate once he enters into his role as a mediator and becomes an exponent of certain ancestral beliefs. I shall argue that this role necessitates an openness and an acceptance of the ambiguity and uncertainty of certain human and non-human relationships. This ambiguity necessarily produces an attitude of openness and awareness in the novel’s central characters that informs the novel’s ecological ethic and expands our notions of inequality to include the more-than-human. Primarily, this dissertation argues that Mda imagines a way of bringing a cultural, animist, world view into the present as a conception of inequality that extends beyond the human. In accompaniment to this dissertation is my own Speculative Fiction novel, Why The River Runs, which is also concerned with what accepting an animist worldview means for my protagonists. The novel explores the mental health struggles of the main protagonist and relates them to the alienating and harmful experience of living under capitalism while also following the second protagonist’s journey through an ancestral calling to become a traditional healer, and follows both protagonists as they navigate a post-apocalyptic scenario. My novel shares several features with Mda’s including ecological issues such as connection with the land and relationships with non-human subjects. Just as Mda does, my novel weaves together this ecological ethic with traditional belief systems and discrepant attitudes towards them. Through the protagonists’ journeys they learn the importance of engaging meaningfully with others as a way of emerging from crippling isolation and inwardness while recognising identity as a process with no certain resolution. / Dissertation (MA (Creative Writing))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / Unit for Creative Writing / MA (Creative Writing) / Unrestricted

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This essay analyzes Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973) in relation to eco-psychology. First, Dwayne Hoover is diagnosed with solastalgia; second, the narrator is shown to suffer from ecological PTSD; and, lastly, the novel is considered in light of the ecological uncanny and the ecological homecoming narrative. Art is identified as the primary method by which characters manage their trauma. It is further suggested that the homecoming narrative serves a similar function to others for purposes of mental health.

This thesis explores the work of Texan painter Alexandre Hogue, and specifically how his 1930s Erosion Series, paintings of wind-ravaged farms during the Dust Bowl, promotes environmental attitudes long before America had a well developed ecological language. It analyzes the Erosion Series in the context of Hogue's personal land ethics and those of his artistic contemporaries, showing that the 1930s series strives to depict the devastation caused by both drought and aggressive farming practices. A comparison of Hogue's work to Regionalist artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood reveals that Regionalists' depictions of land during the 1930s created an unrealistic portrayal of American farms with eternal abundance. In contrast, Hogue's series explores man's relationship to land and shows how that relationship is often destructive rather than constructive. In many ways, Hogue's work is much more in line with works by FSA photographers and filmmakers who, similar to Hogue, imaged more realistic depictions of Midwestern farms at the time. Ultimately, this thesis asserts that paintings, and the fine arts in general, are an important step to a more environmentally minded future—a future Alexandre Hogue sought to promote through nine ecologically charged works.

The recent "greening" of Willa Cather Scholarship has initiated new conversations about Cather's use of and dependence on landscape in her fiction. Scholars have frequently noted Cather's reliance on landscape imagery, but this thesis suggests parallels between Cather's and Henry David Thoreau's use of awakening imagery and examines how such parallels work in Cather's environmental discussion of wilderness and environmental communities. There is little direct evidence linking the development of Cather to Thoreau, although their similar use of awakening imagery suggests they comment on similar environmental discussions through their writing, indicating that Cather deserves further attention as a nature writer. Because Thoreau is often identified as the father of modern nature writing, recognizing similarities between Cather and Thoreau further solidifies Cather's place within the canon of American nature writing. This thesis examines how Cather's awakening imagery in The Song of the Lark is similar to Thoreau's ideas of awakening in Walden. The comparison elucidates Cather's dependence on landscape that evolves into a deeper ecological discussion in My Ántonia where Cather's characters wrestle with finding a balance between modern industry and land preservation, an issue Thoreau also battled in his time. Preservation becomes an important element in Cather's fiction and is explored in this thesis through concepts of wilderness. Finally, I will address how Death Comes for the Archbishop uses awakening imagery and concepts of wilderness to promote the creation of balanced environmental communities. Cather's ability to employ elements of nature writing in Archbishop makes it her strongest holistic showing as a nature writer. Reading Cather as a nature writer who recognized similar environmental issues as Thoreau forces critics to broaden the canon of American nature writing. Such a reading also expands previous ideas of the form and style of traditional nature writing. Recognizing Cather's dependence on landscape gives nature a voice among other social issues Cather addresses in her writing, namely gender, race, and social status. Identifying Cather as an American nature writer issues a greater call to critics and scholars to re-evaluate other texts within and without of the canon for their ecological significance. Focusing on consistent ecological issues and patterns in American literature will broaden our understanding of the nation's evolving ecological imagination.

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.