Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Desire Lines: Reading Queerly Through The Forests Of Medieval Love Literature, Brianna Skye Oliver

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation conducts queer eco-sensitive readings of a selection of medieval love texts in Middle English and Old French. Informed in turns by the works of feminist, queer, and ecocritical scholars, each chapter engages with a different iteration of literary queerness by bringing the representation of natural spaces and objects (especially the forest) to the fore and reading through nature depicted in the texts. The readings all share a broad goal of inviting modern audiences to play with desire and its manifestations within each text to make meaning and compel intimacy between the work and its current audience. Chapter 1 …

Blake’S Green Symbols Of Humanity, Society, And Spirituality, Angela J. Heagy

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

William Blake is an exemplar of Romantic poetry characterized by depictions of the occult, the divine, and human nature. Despite Blake’s reputation as a Romantic poet, many critics claim that there is not sufficient evidence to consider him a nature writer. As a result, Blake’s name is frequently omitted from ecological discussions; some scholars go so far as to claim that Blake’s poetry demonstrates a disregard for nature altogether. This article argues that an eco-critical analysis of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience reveals nature to be Blake’s continual source of inspiration. Within this collection, nature represents the struggles …

"And No Birds Sing": The Environmental Ethics Of Carson, Keats, Sagan, And Oliver, Savannah Bloom

Undergraduate Theses

This project aims to create resonances and synchronicities between the works of science writers Rachel Carson and Carl Sagan and poets John Keats and Mary Oliver. It puts their environmental ethics in conversation with one another with a focus on shared literary practices and ecocritical and ecocentric sensibilities. Is the work of poetry, particularly poetry participating in the Romantic tradition, compatible with science writing? The ultimate goal is to demonstrate the symbiosis between science and literature and the necessity of bridging scientific and poetic discourse in regard to addressing climate and the environment. Each chapter pairs a science writer with …

The Inherent Trauma Of Being: Eco-Terror In The American Naturalist Novella, Jessica Bartel

Senior Theses and Projects

Investigation into the human being and a natural form through nineteenth-century American literature. In both Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and Kate Chopin's The Awakening, the main characters are Othered from their societies due to social, economic, and gendered differences, with devastating consequences. This calls into question how we have engaged with our world, and made it inhabitable for the deviant human, over the course of the last two centuries.

The Ecology Of American Noir, Katrina Younes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In The Ecology of American Noir, I investigate the relationship between the conventions of noir fiction and film and its sub-types in relation to environmental crises. Specifically, I address questions that not only allow us to (re)read early hardboiled literature and neo-noir films, but that also help us identify a new sub-genre of noir and develop an ecocritical methodology: I call this contemporary sub-genre and methodology “eco-noir.” I trace the development of strategies of mapping urban blight and environmental deterioration in classic hardboiled fiction of the 1940s, neo-noir films of the 1970s, and eco-noir texts of the post millennial …

The Aesthetics Of Environmental Risk In Paolo Bacigalupi’S The Windup Girl And The Water Knife, David Schwartz

Theses and Dissertations--English

Any work of environmentally oriented fiction that seeks to represent the wide-reaching effects of climate change is faced with the problem of scale. These texts must render visible change which is at once ubiquitous and microscopic, along with the cascade of side-effects generated in the wake of rising temperature, rising sea levels, and winnowing biodiversity. In short order, these texts must fully imagine what it means to live within the modern global risk society. Borrowing this sociological model from the late Ulrich Beck, I analyze the literary work of Paolo Bacigalupi, one of the foremost authors in the growing genre …

Anxieties About The Future: Ecocriticism And Dystopian Landscapes In The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch And Selected Fiction By Philip K. Dick, Nickolas Michael Sykora

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

In a literary analysis of selected fiction by Philip K Dick through an ecocritical framework, the focus of this study reveals the consequences of ecological destruction on futuristic societies reflecting the Anthropocene. Drawing correlations between various texts by the author, the separation of nature from humanity demonstrates how dystopian landscapes influence the identity of the characters in these settings and how dystopia serves as a prism which distorts or reflects what it means to be human. With this, ontology and artificial intelligence are analyzed as a notable facet of his literature which addresses the progress of innovation in society and …

The Names Of All Wild Things: Field Guides And Environmental Thinking, Frank Izaguirre Phd

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The project first traces the earliest origins of natural history writing, surveying how natural history writing from antiquity presented and categorized the living world, and then how the rise of print culture and growing popularity of natural history writing would facilitate the rise of European empires. Values and conventions emerged that would later feed into the field guide, like the pairing of text and illustration to aid identification and the decontextualizing of plants and animals from their environments.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, the field guide genre emerged. Some wildly popular books, mostly written by women, emphasized the …