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

My dissertation examines critical engagements with the "new urbanist" movement in late 20th and early 21st century U.S. novels, including Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, Helena María Viramontes's Their Dogs Came with Them, and Colson Whitehead's Zone One. I argue that these novels reflect new urbanism's valorization of neighborhoods that are walkable, green, and diverse, even as they critique the movement's inattention to environmental injustice and the long history of urban rights movements. Moreover, I argue that contemporary fiction's engagement with new urbanism has driven formal and stylistic innovation in the novel. The "new urbanist novel," I argue, blends elements of the postmodern literary mode, such as metafiction and narrative fragmentation, with elements that are arguably anti-postmodern, such as representations of stable collective identity and utopian visions of organic urban community.

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.

abstract: From Frankenstein to District 9: Ecocritical Readings of Classic and Contemporary Fiction and Film demonstrates how American studies methodologies, ecological literary criticism, and environmental justice theory provide both time-tested and new analytical tools for reading texts from transnational perspectives. Recently, American literary scholars have been responding to calls for collective interdisciplinary response to widening social disparities and species collapses caused by climate change in the new epoch recently being termed "the anthropocene." In response, I analyze canonical texts, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in juxtaposition with Neill Blomkamp's South African science fiction thriller District 9 and contemporary US American novels such as Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses and Richard Power's Generosity and The Echo Maker, to show how writers, filmmakers, and academics have been calling attention to dramatic climate events that consequently challenge the public to rethink the relationships among human beings to other species, and to ecological systems of low predictability, high variability, and frequent extremes. Rather than focusing solely on the "human," I examine how the relationships and livelihoods of multi-species communities shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces. As a whole, this dissertation seeks to make abstract, often intangible global patterns and concepts accessible by providing models for what I call "readings in the anthropocene" or re-readings of classic and contemporary texts and film that offer insights into changing human behavior and suggesting alternative management practices of local and global commons as well as opportunities to imagine how to live in and beyond the anthropocene. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2015

abstract: This dissertation is both creative and scholarly, engaging in the technique of "narrative scholarship," an increasingly accepted technique within the field of ecocriticism. The project is framed by my experiences with Spanish and Latino actors as well as activists involved with the 15-M movement in and around Madrid. It takes a "material ecocritical" approach, which is to say that it treats minds, spirits and language as necessarily "bodied" entities, and creates an absolute union between beings and the matter that constructs them as well as their habitat. I apply the lens of Jesper Hoffmeyer's Biosemiotics, which claims that life is at its most essential levels a communicative process. In other words, I will explore how "all matter is 'storied' matter," as well as how the "semiosphere," which is an important concept in biosmiotics, signaling a semiotic environment that predicts and defines all biological bodies/life, the human, the plant and the animal as beings who are made of and involved in semiotic activity, can serve as a basis for union amongst all bodies and provide a model of cooperation rooted in "storytelling." My project aims to embody what Wendy Wheeler describes as ecocriticism's, "syntheses between the sciences and the humanities" It is my strong opinion that creative writing has the power to offer the general public insight into the reasons why new research in biosemiotics is so important to the work that activists are doing to raise awareness of how humans can live responsibly on the only planet that is our home. This will help readers of creative writing and cultural studies scholars understand why they ought to embrace science, especially in literary and cultural studies, as a path to better understanding of the role of the humanities in an increasingly scientifically oriented world. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

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.

This thesis addresses the question posed to ecocriticism by Dana Phillips in his iconoclastic The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America: “What is the truth of ecology, insofar as this truth is addressed by literature and art?” by examining how ecocriticism has, or has failed to, contextualize ecocritical discourse within an ecological framework. After reviewing the current state of ecocriticism and its relationship with environmentalism, the thesis suggests that both rely on the same outmoded, inaccurate and essentially inutile ecological concepts and language, and argues for a new approach to ecocriticism that borrows its concepts and language from the geophilosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The thesis concludes with a reassessment of the work of Barry Lopez, showing how his fiction, when viewed through the lens of geophilosophy, does not support essentialist notions of nature, but rather works to articulate a world of multiplicities, and new modes of becoming.

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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