Post-apartheid writing has been characterized by an ardent search for a voice that truly depicts the painful apartheid past. The establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) promoted a confessional mode of writing as a means to obtaining healing, hence reconstitution. Such a paradigm shift in writing necessitated imagined characters to re-invent and re-align themselves with the new post-apartheid dispensation if they were to remain relevant to South African readership. Reinvention of characters is made possible through several means and various organs of reconstitution such as history, narration, possession of one’s landscape and a disavowal of belonging as depicted in The Native Commissioner. This study seeks to examine the process of self-constitution undergone by the co-protagonist and surrogate narrator, Sam Jameson, following his failure to function as an individual and father in post-apartheid South Africa. To this end, a close reading of the novel is done, to better understand the context of Sam’s trauma. The study traces the self-reconstitutive process of Sam from the moment he decides to re-visit his father’s past, to the moment when he finds release from the trauma. I argue that an investigation of his father’s life, as well as his, ultimately gives him agency over his own. Sam’s identity shifts from his childhood past, in which apartheid exerts primary influence, to that of an adult who lives in the post-apartheid moment, having come to terms with his past. Telling his story, to him becomes an act of re-creation and self-invention and the means by which he formulates his own identity. At the end of the story, it is a totally liberated individual that the reader witnesses. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This project focuses on the natural elements earth and water as presented in the works of African American author Toni Morrison. The primary texts analyzed are Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. In the first two novels, Morrison alludes to the abuse of black bodies by drawing parallels between the destruction of trees and the negative effects of urbanization. I argue that environmental destruction and urbanization parallels the disenfranchisement and killing of black bodies. Water in Beloved connotes bondage because of its historical link to the Triangular Trade. However, considering Morrison's frequent mention of water and the fugitives' constant need to drink, I argue that ingesting water symbolizes a need for psychological freedom. All of the novels that I have analyzed emphasize the complex connections between African Americans and nature. / by Pauline P. Anderson. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2012. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

Not available / text

This dissertation engages a number of currents of environmental criticism and rhetoric in an analysis of the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction of the southeastern United States. I examine conceptions of genitive relationships with the environment as portrayed in the work of diverse writers, primarily William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neal Hurston, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts. Southern literature is rarely addressed in ecocritical studies, and to date no work offers an intensive and focused examination of the rhetoric employed in conceptions of environmental ownership. However, southern literature and culture provides fertile ground to trace the creation, development, and communication of environmental values because of its history of agrarianism, slavery, and a literary tradition committed to a sense of place. I argue that the concerns of the two main distinctive threads of environmental literary scholarship - ecopoetics and environmentalism of the poor - neatly overlap in the literature of the South. I employ rhetorical theory and phenomenology to argue that southern authors call into question traditional forms of writing about nature - such as pastoral, the sublime, and wilderness narratives - to reinvent and revitalize those forms in order to develop and communicate modes of reciprocal ownership of natural and cultural environments. These writers not only imagine models of personal and communal coexistence with the environment, but also provide new ways of thinking about environmental justice. The intersection of individual and social relationships with history and nature in Southern literature provides new models for thinking about environmental relationships and how they are communicated. I argue that expressions of environmental ownership and belonging suggest how individuals and groups can better understand their distance and proximity to their environments, which may result in new valuations of personal and social environmental relationships.

xi, 233 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation argues that a fundamental paradox underlies U.S. environmentalism: even as it functions as a critique of dominant social and economic practices, environmentalism simultaneously reinforces many social hierarchies, especially with regard to race, immigration, and disability, despite its claims to recognize the interdependence of human and ecological well-being. This project addresses the related questions: In what ways does environmentalism--as a code of behavioral imperatives and as a set of rhetorical strategies--ironically play a role in the exploitation of land and communities? Along what lines--class, race, ability, gender, nationality, age, and even "sense of place"--do these environmental codes and discourses delineate good and bad environmental behavior? I contend that environmentalism emerged in part to help legitimize U.S. imperial ambitions and support racialized and patriarchal conceptions of national identity. Concern about "the environment" made anxieties about communities of color more palatable than overt racism. Furthermore, "environmentalism's hidden attachments" to whiteness and Manifest Destiny historically aligned the movement with other repressive ideologies, such as eugenics and strict anti-immigration. These "hidden attachments" exist today, yet few have analyzed their contemporary implications, a gap this project fills. In three chapters, I detail nineteenth-century environmentalism's influence on contemporary environmental thought. Each of these three illustrative chapters investigates a distinct category of environmentalism's "ecological others": Native Americans, people with disabilities, and undocumented immigrants. I argue that environmentalism defines these groups as "ecological others" because they are viewed as threats to nature and to the American national body politic. The first illustrative chapter analyzes Native American land claims in Leslie Marmon Silko's 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead . The second illustrative chapter examines the importance of the fit body in environmental literature and U.S. adventure culture. In the third illustrative chapter, I integrate literary analysis with geographical theories and methods to investigate national security, wilderness protection, and undocumented immigration in the borderland. In a concluding fourth chapter, I analyze works of members of the excluded groups discussed in the first three chapters to show how they transform mainstream environmentalism to bridge social justice and ecological concerns. This dissertation contains previously published material. / Committee in charge: Shari Huhndorf, Chairperson, English; Louise Westling, Member, English; David Vazquez, Member, English; Juanita Sundberg, Member, Not from U of 0 Susan Hardwick, Outside Member, Geography

x, 255 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation examines transatlantic, and especially American, literary responses to urban and industrial change from the 1840s through the 1930s. It combines cultural materialist theory with environmental history in order to investigate the interrelationship of literature, economy, and biophysical systems. In lieu of a traditional ecocritical focus on wilderness preservation and the accompanying literary mode of nature writing, I bring attention to reforms of the "built environment" and to the related category of social problem fiction, including narratives of documentary realism, urban naturalism, and politically-oriented utopianism. The novels and short stories of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and Mike Gold offer an alternative history of environmental writing, one that foregrounds the interaction between nature and labor. Through a strategy of "literal reading" I connect the representation of particular environments in the work of these authors to the historical situation of actual spaces, including the western Massachusetts forest of Melville's "Tartarus of Maids," the Virginia factory town of Davis's Iron Mills, the Midwestern hinterland of Sinclair's The Jungle, and the New York City ghetto of Gold's Jews without Money. Even as these texts foreground the class basis of environmental hazard, they simultaneously display an ambivalence toward the physical world, wavering between pastoral celebrations and gothic vilifications of nature, and condemning ecological destruction even as they naturalize the very socio-economic forces responsible for such calamity. Following Raymond Williams, I argue that these contradictory treatments of nature have a basis in the historical relationship between capitalist society and the material world. Fiction struggles to contain or resolve its implication in the very culture that destroys the land base it celebrates. Thus, the formal fissures and the anxious eruptions of nature in fiction relate dialectically to the contradictory position of the ecosystem itself within the regime of industrial capital. However, for all of this ambivalence, transatlantic social reform fiction of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century provides a model for an environmentally-oriented critical realist aesthetic, an aesthetic that retains suspicion toward representational transparency, and yet simultaneously asserts the didactic, ethical, and political functions of literature. / Committee in charge: William Rossi, Chairperson, English; Henry Wonham, Member, English; Enrique Lima, Member, English; Louise Westling, Member, English; John Foster, Outside Member, Sociology

190 pages / Twenty-first century American cinema is permeated by images of globalization and environmental change. Responding to what Yale researchers have described as a “sea change” in public perceptions of global warming occurring between 2004 and 2007, this dissertation provides the first extended examination of Hollywood’s response to the planet’s most pressing social and environmental challenge – global climate change. Among the most widely distributed and consumed forms of popular culture, Hollywood blockbuster films provide a unique textual window into the cultural logic of ecology during this important turning point in Americans’ perceptions of environmental risk. The term “cultural logic of ecology” is defined as the collective cultural expression of a society’s dominant perceptions and enactments of its relationships with other organisms and their shared bio-physical environments. Surveying the history of climate cinema, my second chapter examines the production and reception contexts of the two films most responsible for renewing public interest in global warming: The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Despite their generic differences, both films combine the formal techniques of melodrama and realism to translate the science of global warming into a moral vernacular. In subsequent chapters, I further intertwine textual and historical analysis to examine other films released during the period that portray aspects of global warming. Considered a children’s film, Happy Feet (2006) employs digital animation to illustrate the ecological impacts of globalization on Antarctica, thus presenting viewers with a more accurate picture of the threats facing emperor penguins than did the documentary March of the Penguins (2005). I next analyze There Will Be Blood (2007) as a critique of patriarchy and natural resource exploitation that resonated with American filmgoers as oil prices were skyrocketing and President George W. Bush admitted “America is addicted to oil.” Consumed on Imax screens and iPods, and as toys, t-shirts, and video games, blockbusters leave massive cultural and carbon footprints. I conclude by arguing that ecocritical scholarship offers the most effective scholarly toolkit for understanding contemporary cinema as a cultural, textual, and material phenomenon. / Committee in charge: Dr. Michael Aronson, Chairperson; Dr. Sangita Gopal, Member; Dr. Louise Westling, Member; Dr. Jon Lewis, Member, from Oregon StateUniversity; Dr. Patrick Bartlein, Outside Member

Le désert du Néguev est communément considéré comme une zone « périphérique » de nature sauvage en Israël. Il occupe cependant une position stratégique, essentielle à l’existence du « Centre ». Cette région est dotée d’une forte valeur symbolique, positive et négative à la fois. Perçu comme un espace spirituel dans lequel s’est constitué le peuple, il est aussi assimilé à l’exil en tant que lieu de désolation menaçant sa survie. Depuis les années 1920, la tendance était à sa conquête et à sa fertilisation. En revanche, depuis les années 1980, on insiste davantage sur son développement dans le respect des valeurs écologiques et dans le souci de préserver sa nature sauvage.La recherche est située dans le domaine de l’observation écocritique, qui examine les relations entre l’homme et son environnement à l’ère postcoloniale. C’est dans ce cadre qu’a été étudié l’impact d’une série d’oppositions hiérarchisées telles que culture vs nature, développement vs préservation, centre vs périphérie.Les représentations du désert dans le discours public ont été examinées à la lumière de ces oppositions, depuis les années 1940 à ce jour, par l’analyse de divers supports : les médias (presse, télévision et internet), les programmes de développement fixés par l’Etat et la littérature hébraïque. La recherche ainsi menée vise à montrer comment la dévalorisation du collectivisme dans la société israélienne, sur fond de mondialisation, a renforcé le potentiel d’influence des groupes sociaux sur la construction de l’identité spatiale du Néguev. / The Negev desert occupies most of the territory of the State of Israel, having a strategic importance for the existence of the "center" and at the same time it is considered as a natural wild “periphery”. This region has a symbolic value with different charges, positive and negative. It is considered as a spiritual space where the Hebrew people were constituted, but it is also associated with the exile which threatens the continuation of the nation existence. Since the 1920s, there was a tendency to "conquer" the desert and "flourish" it. Nevertheless, since the 1980s, the tendency is to develop it according to ecological values, while preserving its natural character. The research is situated in the field of ecocriticism, which examines the relationship between man and his environment in the postcolonial era. It is in this framework that the impact of hierarchical oppositions, including culture versus nature, development versus conservation and center versus periphery, are being studied. The representations of the desert in the public discourse are examined in the light of these oppositions, since the 1940s to the present, through texts analysis of: the media (press, television and internet); development programs established by the State; and Hebrew literature. The study shows how as a result of the decline in the status of collectivism in Israeli society, as part of globalization processes, increases the ability of social groups to influence the construction of spatial identity of the Negev desert.

Literary texts of medieval England feature trees as essential to the individual and communal identity as it intersects with nature, and the compelling qualities and organic processes associated with trees help vernacular writers interrogate the changing nature of this character. The early depiction of trees demonstrates an intimacy with nature that wanes after the tenth-century monastic revival, when the representation of trees as living, physical entities shifts toward their portrayal as allegorical vehicles for the Church's didactic use. With the emergence of new social categories in the late Middle Ages, the rhetoric of trees moves beyond what it means to forge a Christian identity to consider the role of a ruler and his subjects, the relationship between humans and nature, and the place of women in society. Taking as its fundamental premise that people in wooded regions develop a deep-rooted connection to trees, this dissertation connects medieval culture and the physical world to consider the variety of ways in which Anglo-Saxon and post-Norman vernacular manuscripts depict trees. A personal identification with trees, a desire for harmony between society and the environment, and a sympathy for the work of trees lead to the narrator's transformation in the Dream of the Rood. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Junius 11 manuscript, illustrated in Genesis A, Genesis B, and manuscript images, scrutinizes the Anglo-Saxon Christian's relationship and responsibility to God in the aftermath of the Fall. As writers transform trees into allegories in works like Genesis B and Geoffrey Chaucer's Parson's Tale, the symbolic representations retain their spontaneous, organic processes to offer readers a visual picture of the Christian interior-the heart. Whereas the Parson's Tale promotes personal and radical change through a horticultural narrative starring the Tree of Penitence and Tree of Vices, Chaucer's Knight's Tale appraises the role of autonomous subjects in a tyrannical system. Forest laws of the post-Norman period engender a bitter polemic about the extent of royal power to appropriate nature, and the royal grove of the Knight's Tale exposes the limitations of monarchical structures and masculine control and shapes a pragmatic response to human failures.

This thesis explores representations of wild nature in two Arthurian texts – one British and one American – produced in an age characterised by rapid social transformation: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-1885) and Howard Pyle’s Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903). By investigation of the textual descriptions of wilderness and the portrayals of characters living there, the study aims to investigate what attitudes towards unkempt nature are displayed in the two texts. While both narratives give evidence of a powerful nostalgia for a vanishing paradise, the yearning for Eden is expressed quite differently. Pyle’s text fuses the concepts of wilderness and paradise together by depicting the unkempt landscape as a place of splendour and spiritual enjoyment. Such a celebration of nature might well be seen a reaction against the rapid loss of wild spaces across America (and Britain) during the life-time of the author. In the Idylls, paradise is represented in the domesticated yet green landscape of the faraway fairy island of Avilion. Wilderness, on the other hand, is depicted as a harmful disease progressively spreading across the realm, arguably bringing about a moral degeneration among the human characters. In the end, however, it is not wilderness, but the corruption of the supposedly civilised characters that causes the collapse of Arthur’s empire. On closer inspection, the real danger thus seems to come from culture and material conditions rather than from nature.