The purpose of this essay is to examine how ecocritical readings of poems and song lyrics can work as a catalyst for discussing questions regarding sustainable development in the subject of English. The poems “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth and “Andrew”by Andrea Gibson, but also the song lyrics for the song “Every Age”by José Gonzalez were selected for the analyze, since they can represent the varying types of texts that are used by teachers in upper secondary school.   The essay leans heavily on different terms associated with ecocriticism and other closely related fields such as ecofeminism and environmental pedagogy since it can help to create an understanding for the complexity of sustainability and how it can be taught in the classroom.   The analyses showed that it is possible to address sustainable development through ecocritical readings of poems and song lyrics. There are two obvious ways forward that could be taken where the first would be to analyze even more texts in order to see if the methods used in the analyses are applicable to any other number of texts that are available to use in the classroom. The other way would be to apply the methods in a classroom situation and see if the methods would be suited for upper secondary school students.

This dissertation argues that Pacific literature is haunted by a form of ecological aggression known as nuclear colonialism. The Pacific is the region of the world where Western nations tested most of their nuclear and thermonuclear weapons – an extreme form of colonial occupation that will impact both the land and the people for hundreds of thousands of years. This study analyzes Pacific works published post World War II, from Māori poet Hone Tuwhare’s 1964 collection of poetry to riMajel oral performer Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s 2017 videoart, focusing in particular on the francophone works of writers identifying as Kanak, Mā’ohi, and Ni-Vanuatu. Through a series of close-readings of this multilingual and transnational corpus, it argues that nuclear colonialism functions as a leitmotiv informing both the politics and the poetics of this anticolonial corpus, despite the fact that nuclear violence is often denounced in between the lines, through oblique and diffuse references mirroring the ubiquity of radioactivity itself.

This is an ecocritical analysis of the novel Glupahungern by Andrea Lundgren. I investigate how nature is viewed by looking at two things. First, I look at two functions in the novel. I analyze the function of characters that seem to be in between the human side and the animal side. I call them creatures of the border. I also analyze the function of places that can be seen as borderlands. Places between nature and society. Second, I do a small comparison between Glupahungern and the novel Hjortronlandet by Sara Lidman since they both are written by authors from the north of Sweden and the novels also takes place in the northern parts. Through this comparison I find similarities between the novel and how nature is viewed in them and I come to the conclusion that the place has an impact on the view of nature. Keywords: Nature, Border, Ecocriticism, View on nature, Northern Sweden

Traditional historical writing focuses on the cause and effect of human action, assuming that it is the historian's responsibility to recount the ebbs and flows of human progress. In the process of laying hold of the past as a narrative of human action, historical writing has developed the tendency to marginalise nature and undermine its power to influence the historical narrative. My investigation explores the fantastic in historical fantasy as a means of resisting historical writing's anthropocentrism. Historical fantasy uses fantastical elements to create counterfactual and alternative historical realities that have the potential to resist and undermine history's anthropocentric norm. My thesis examines four contemporary young adult historical fantasy trilogies that reimagine key turning points in history such as industrialisation, the American frontier, European imperialism, and World War I. They share the theme of retrieving and subverting anthropocentric discourses in the history of human development and thereby creating space for nature's presence and agency. My study finds that the fantastic is an effective means of subverting historical writing's anthropocentrism. But it also uncovers ambiguities and contradictions in historical fantasy's ecological revisionism, pointing to the idea that despite the fantastic's capacity for subversion, historical representations of nature cannot be separated from considerations of human identity and survival.

Through the filters of postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and digital humanities, this project considers the capabilities and limitations of novels to galvanize action in response to environmental crises. My findings suggest that novels are well equipped to engage in environmental education, although some of the form’s conventions must be disrupted to fully capitalize upon its strengths. The modern novel is conventionally limited in scope, often resorts to apocalyptic narratives that can breed hopelessness, is dedicated to a form of realism that belies the dramatic weather events exacerbated by climate change, defers authority to a single voice, and is logocentric. By supplementing conventional novels with a variety of paratexts, including digital tools, scientific findings, non-fiction accounts of past, present, and future activism, and authorial biography, it is my contention that the novel’s potency as a pedagogical tool increases. After addressing this project’s stakes and contexts in my Introduction, Chapter II assesses three South Asian novels in English that are concerned with sustainable development: Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. I conclude by considering how StoryMaps might further disrupt pro-sustainable development propaganda alongside more traditional novels. Chapter III examines how explicitly activist South Asian novelists construct authorial personae that propose additional solutions to the environmental problems identified in their novels, focusing on Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People. Chapter IV coins the term “locus-colonial novel,” a novel that decenters the human, situating place at the fulcrum of a work of historical fiction, using Hari Kunzru’s Gods without Men as one exemplar. I examine Kunzru’s novel alongside promotional materials for planned Mars missions to consider how narratives of colonialism on Earth might lead to a more socially and environmentally sustainable colonial model for Mars. Chapter V introduces the concept of a digital locus-colonial novel that allows users to develop informed, environmentally focused scenarios for colonial Mars. Through these chapters, this dissertation identifies specific rhetorical techniques that allow conscientious novels to create imaginative spaces where readers might explore solutions to the social, economic, and increasingly environmental problems facing human populations worldwide.

In the postwar era of the United States, as military-industrial chemicals leak into airways, waterways, and foodways in unprecedented plumes and cancer clusters, comic art forms generate diverse environmental imaginations. Though historically disparaged as disposable ephemera, comics provide unique access to environmental expression in this critical period. This dissertation analyzes the formal registers of two independent newspaper strips and four graphic cancer narratives for an aesthetics of equity: a set of verbal-visual moves that chart awareness of environmental devastation as determined by privilege and power. The iconicity of the drawn body--its lines, shape, and movement--grapples with complex legacies of environmental harm and exclusion. Maps of environmental risk perception generated through game board motifs, collages, and icon repetition rely on the capacity of sequential art to engage readers in recognizing and analyzing postwar risk. In form and theme, an aesthetics of equity in comics deploys environmental knowledges subordinated and sharpened by interlocking social inequities. This aesthetics revises the elisions and assumptions of mainstream environmentalisms. Ultimately, comics demand a literacy particularly well suited to environmental justice (EJ) ecocriticsm. The dissertation comprises three chapters of analysis. The first examines competing environmental discourses in Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For (1982-2008). This newspaper strip coincides exactly with the start of the contemporary EJ movement. In examining three character arcs across a quarter of a century, I track the emergence of EJ discourse in Bechdel's distinctly lesbian environmental imagination. The second chapter examines the heteronormative limits of the EJ story arc in Jackie Ormes' midcentury romance strip Torchy in Heartbeats (1953-4). Published weekly in the Comic Section of the Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier, Torchy chronicles its eponymous heroine's quest to end environmental racism in the fictional small town of Southville. Torchy's affect and body language revise romance genre conventions and expose sexism and racism as intersecting environmental oppressions. The third chapter examines transcoporeal exchange in four contemporary graphic cancer narratives from the early 21st century. This chapter examines the extent to which graphic cancer narratives "move out," to use Diane Herndl's phrase, to form coalitions with disparate environmental communities. / 2015-10-17

This thesis examines Darren Aronofsky's 2014 film Noah as a pattern for metafictionalizing narratives into thinking stories as we confront the uncertainty and challenges of the Anthropocene. While Ecocriticism has sought for the development and promotion of nature writing and environmentally oriented poetry and fiction- "new stories" that will shape a stronger environmental ethic"”it has placed too much responsibility for the environmental imagination on what we read rather than on the more important question of how we read. My argument addresses the readerly responsibilities that, if met, have the power to transform old stories and old habits of mind into environmentally relevant attitudes and behaviors. The search for new stories, in other words, although important, has tended to understate the responsibility of the reader to make stories new and to read them as cosmologies that pertain to our contemporary situation. What is needed are new ways to read and engage with stories, new reading methods to metaphorize narratives themselves, making them metafictional even when they are not. Now, in an age of climate change and environmental degradation, it is time for us to think about stories in relation to our role as protagonists in the story of the earth, imagining new possibilities and actively accepting our role of writing our story anew. I hope to demonstrate that this type of aggressive reading of even popular culture (often regarded as mainstream, or "œthoughtless" stories) can mine the necessary insights to reexamine humanity's relationship with the earth and its inhabitants.

abstract: This thesis examines perceptions of climate change in literature through the lens of the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary field that brings history, ecocriticism, and anthropology together to consider the environmental past, present and future. The project began in Iceland, during the Svartárkot Culture-Nature Program called “Human Ecology and Culture at Lake Mývatn 1700-2000: Dimensions of Environmental and Cultural Change”. Over the course of 10 days, director of the program, Viðar Hreinsson, an acclaimed literary and Icelandic Saga scholar, brought in researchers from different fields of study in Iceland to give students a holistically academic approach to their own environmental research. In this thesis, texts under consideration include the Icelandic Sagas, My Antonia by Willa Cather, Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita, and The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. The thesis is supported by secondary works written by environmental humanists, including Andrew Ross, Steve Hartman, Ignacio Sanchez Cohen, and Joni Adamson, who specialize in archeological research on heritage sites in Iceland and/or study global weather patterns, prairie ecologies in the American Midwest, the history of water in the Southwest, and climate fiction. Chapter One, focusing on the Icelandic Sagas and My Antonia, argues that literature from different centuries, different cultures, and different parts of the world offers evidence that humans have been driving environmental degradation at the regional and planetary scales since at least the 1500s, especially as they have engaged in aggressive forms of settlement and colonization. Chapter Two, focused on Tropic of Orange, this argues that global environmental change leads to extreme weather and drought that is increasing climate migration from the Global South to the Global North. Chapter Three, focused on The Water Knife, argues that climate fiction gives readers the opportunity to think about and better prepare for a viable and sustainable future rather than wait for inevitable apocalypse. By exploring literature that depicts and represents climate change through time, environmental humanists have innovated new methods of analysis for teaching and thinking about what humans must understand about their impacts on ecosystems so that we can better prepare for the future. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis English 2019

In response to the economic and political upheaval of World War I, Scottish Modernism explored the cultural and linguistic changes of a nation trying to identify itself amidst a world-wide conflict. Scholars and critics have considered Nan Shepherd's fiction in this context—focusing on issues of gender, female identity, language, and land—but have yet to look seriously at her work The Living Mountain and its contributions to the Modernist movement. More recently, critics like Louisa Gairn and Robert MacFarlane have called attention to Shepherd's small but powerful text in an ecocritical and philosophical light, reframing her contribution to issues of Scottish identity from the Modernist era. Ecocriticism is concerned with the importance of place in relation to human conceptions of identity and explores how landscapes, even a mountain, can elucidate understanding of human being. Ontological questions of being have been explored in relation to place and landscape for several centuries and require, or invite, new narratives of the experience of these encounters, which makes present ecocritical studies an ideal place to do so. This thesis examines Nan Shepherd's work in the intersection of ecocriticism and ontology. To understand a mountain as living, a new language and a new ontology of place is required. The work of Gilles Deleuze on immanence becomes crucial to an understanding of why local place and a connection to it creates a deeper understanding of being and of a language that offers a desubjectivized perspective of a shared awareness between matter. In Shepherd's encounters with the organic and the inorganic her language of experience explores an interaction between her own senses and their perception of the mountain's body of elementals, or the means of apprehending the vitality of the mountain as a living thing. An intriguing twenty-first-century conception of place emerges from Shepherd's modernist perspective and reframes how a landscape and inorganic matter can elucidate human being.

In this dissertation, I argue that two dominant perspectives on farming in Canada—the technoscientific capitalist perspective on modern industrial farming and the popular vision of hard-won survival on the family farm—both draw on narrative and aesthetic strategies that have deep roots in distinct, but related variations of the georgic tradition, which arrived in Canada in the eighteenth century and continues to shape literary representations and material practices today. Critics of Canadian literature have tended to subsume the georgic under the category of pastoral, but I argue that the georgic is a separate and more useful category for understanding the complex myths and realities of agricultural production in Canada precisely because it is a literary genre that focuses on the labour of farming and because it constitutes a complex and multi-generic discourse which both promotes and enables critique of dominant agricultural practices. I argue that, despite its sublimation beneath the pastoral, the georgic mode has also been an important cultural nexus in Canadian literature and culture, and that it constitutes a set of conventions that have become so commonplace in writing that deals with agricultural labour and its related issues in Canada that they have come to seem both inevitable and natural within the Canadian cultural tradition, even if they have not been explicitly named as georgic. By analyzing a variety of texts such as Oliver Goldmith’s The Rising Village, Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, Al Purdy’s In Search of Owen Roblin, Robert Kroetsch’s “The Ledger,” Christian Bok’s Xenotext, Rita Wong’s Forage, and Phil Hall’s Amanuensis, I recontextualize Canadian writing that deals with agrarian work within two distinct but related georgic traditions. As Raymond Williams and others have shown, the georgic’s inclusion of both pastoralizing myths and material realities makes it useful for exploring ecological questions. The georgic is often understood in terms of what Karen O’Brien has called the imperial georgic mode, which involves a technocratic, imperialist, capitalist approach to agriculture, and which helped theorize and justify imperial expansion and the technological domination of nature. But as ecocritics like David Fairer, Margaret Ronda, and Kevin Goodman have argued, the georgic’s concern with the contingency and precariousness of human relationships with nonhuman systems also made it a productive site for imagining alternatives to imperial ways of organizing social and ecological relations. Ronda calls this more ecologically-focused and adaptable georgic the disenchanted georgic, but I call it the precarious georgic because of the way it enables engagement with what Anna Tsing calls precarity. Precarity, as Tsing explains, describes life without the promise of mastery or stability, which is a condition that leaves us in a state of being radically dependent on other beings for survival. “The challenge for thinking with precarity,” she writes, “is to understand the ways projects for making scalability have transformed landscape and society, while seeing also where scalability fails—and where nonscalable ecological and economic relations erupt” (42). By tracing the interplay between imperial and precarious georgic modes in Canadian texts that have mistakenly been read as pastoral—from Moodie’s settler georgic to the queer gothic georgic of Ostenso’s Wild Geese to the provisional and object-oriented georgics of Robert Kroetsch and Phil Hall—I argue that the precarious georgic strain has always engaged in this process of thinking with precarity, and that it holds the potential for providing space to re-imagine our ecological relations.