This essay examines the 1994, Vollmann novel The Rifles through a postcolonial ecocritical lens. It answers the following questions: How is nature and landscapes depicted in The Rifles? How is the relationship between humans and nature portrayed, and how does this relationship differ among the characters in The Rifles? How does The Rifles represent the human exploitation of nature and the Canadian indigenous population? This essay uses the postcolonial ecocritical theories of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, especially their ideas of “neocolonialism” and “the tourist and the native”. Another theoretical foundation for this essay is the theories of Timothy Morton in the book Dark Ecology, mainly the theory about “strange loops”. There isn’t a lot of previous research in this category, but Catherine Lanone has a similar idea, that The Rifles depicts nature in a state of decay. Lanone argues that this is white intrusion is the reason for the state of decay, while this essay argues that it is the technology of said intruders that is the reason for decay: the rifle. This essay shows that the rifle is starting point of the way the novel depicts nature. And that the relation between the rifle and nature is in a so-called strange loop. This essay also comes to the conclusion that the novel generally depicts two types of characters “the tourist” and “the native”, and that the way these two types of characters depicts nature differs, the tourists are naïve, while the natives are in a state of realist, melancholy-nostalgia. / <p>Slutgiltigt godkännandedatum: 2023-05-31</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:miun-49367 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Edholm, Albin |
| Publisher | Mittuniversitetet, Institutionen för humaniora och samhällsvetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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