English Language and Literature Commons^™

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 …

Dismantling Dualisms: Jane’S Liminal Agency In Charlotte Brontë’S Jane Eyre, Nicole Baniukaitis

Masters Theses

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a complex and, at times, seemingly paradoxical novel. Through Jane’s journey, I argue that Charlotte Brontë offers possibilities that can be explained and understood through Val Plumwood’s ecofeminist lens of dismantling or escaping dualisms in order to make these crucial changes and rewrite the traditional story. Jane’s liminality throughout the novel empowers her, offers her access to alternative modalities, and allows her to notice the oppressive dualistic structures governing all aspects of life. Due to her unique liminal positioning, Jane is aligned with nature and fights against oppressive dualisms to shape her life in a …

Rather Than To Seem: Black And Indigenous Narratives In A Stormy, Swampy South, Jennifer Denise Peedin

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

I examine the narratives of the South that have been historically overlooked, ignored, or hidden in order to establish a dominant narrative of the region. The narratives examined here are by southern Black and Indigenous authors who restore lost knowledge and offer histories that help complete the South culturally and ecologically. The conceptual methodology develops from LeAnne Howe’s tribalography which explains that Indigenous people create stories and histories that transform the space around them and offer an understanding of the world around us. Another methodology used is Anthony Wilson’s ecocritical swamp studies; each chapter analyzes a narrative centered around a …

Monstrous Oil: Theorizing Petromodernity's Monsters, Madalynn Lee Madigar

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Petroleum, a primary global energy resource, serves as a foundation of our contemporary society. However, the pervasive influence of oil as substance, commodity, and industry in our petromodern lives often goes unrecognized. In the present moment of biogeocultural crisis surrounding fossil fuels, recognizing and understanding our multifaceted engagements with petroleum is critical. This thesis contributes to the growing field of Petrocultural Studies by considering the conceptualization of petroleum through the associated tropes and figure of the monster. Through the petromonstrous, a term that encapsulates the massive scale, haunting effects, and human-other entanglements of petroleum, cultural attitudes and anxieties about oil …

Ecocriticism And The Young Adult Audience In Dry And The Islands At The End Of The World, Nicole Marie Sysyn

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis focuses on exploring and analyzing two young adult novels through an ecocritical lens. The authors of the young adult novels, Dry and The Islands at the End of the Earth, bring awareness to young readers about the progression of global warming and effects this devastation has on humans and animals. Both of these novels show character’s relationships with nature, decision making skills in terms of crisis, and coping mechanisms which can translate to young readers. There is a great balance of teaching young readers the importance of their own relationship with the environment and how to cope in …

Invisible Monsters: Chuck Palahniuk’S Transgressive Look At A Hyperrealized Society, Jordan R. Trevarthen

MSU Graduate Theses

By critically analyzing Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, I was able to conclude that the transgressive portrayal of hyperrealized consumerism warranted a close examination into the value American society places on an individual’s ability to replace authenticity for consumer obedience. Palahniuk’s dangerous representation of the body throughout the novel serves to highlight numerous ways in which a consumer transgresses against their own physical and mental well-being to achieve happiness constructed by capitalistic agendas. By using French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality in connection with gender, disability, and feminist theory and ecocriticism, I attempt to deconstruct the neoliberal ideology to which …

Old Invisible Presence: Nonhuman Intelligence And Artificial Nature In A Coast Of Trees By A. R. Ammons And S*Perm**K*T By Harryette Mullen, Miles Jochem

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Maneuvering Mestizaje In Shakespeare's Tragicomedies, Andrea Phiana Borunda

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project explores and wades through the implications of mestizaje in the murky depths of Shakespeare’s oceans. Disguises and mistakes in identities and in gender and “race” draw on the hybridity and indeterminacy of the early modern stage and its fluidity and lack of order to reflect an unhomed and unmediated formation of nationhood, diaspora, and (trans)global identities. Drawing on ecocritical and critical race theories, I contend the tragicomic works of Shakespeare expose and dismantle ecoracial fantasies of white male supremacy to curate a space of mestizaje for a new generation of BIPOC scholars.

Wilderness Is Not A Safe Space: How Nature Has Been Used As A Form Of Oppression Towards Black People Throughout American History, Dorothy Irrera

English Honors Theses

This Capstone won Skidmore's Racial Justice Student Award. An analysis of literature, American history, and pop culture, Wilderness Is Not a Safe Space: How Nature Has Been Used as a Form of Oppression Towards Black People Throughout American History uses a sociological lens to approach the inherent relationship between racism and wilderness.

The “Muddle” Of Landscape And Machinery In E.M. Forster’S Howard’S End And A Passage To India: An Ecocritical Reading, Ryan Ignatius Vera

Theses and Dissertations

This is an ecocritical reading of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Howard's End. I argue that Forster is concerned with imperial power structures that damaged the environment, as well as the looming aftereffects of the Industrial Revolution on both landscape and the people that reside in it.

"This Blessed Plot": An Ecocritical Approach To Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy, Silvina Barna

Master of Arts in Humanities | Master's Theses 1936 - 2022

This research project aims at bringing to light the non-human dimension in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, i.e., Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV and Henry V. In the context of the military confrontations that preceded the Wars of the Roses, the disruption of human relationships bears an impact on the land and the non-human cosmos in general. Through his literary craft and thorough understanding of human and non-human nature, Shakespeare reveals an intricate network of relationships, which, even when broken, can be mended.

My project is guided by a presentist understanding of literature. Studying the relationship between the human …

Adapting Animals: Nineteenth-Century British Literature, Science, And Media, Kristen Layne Figgins

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin and other proponents of evolutionary theory provided a theoretical framework for discussing the question of humanity’s place in the world. These nascent theories emphasized the shared animal nature of humans and the nonhuman creatures who had once occupied a distinctly lower place on the chain of being. My dissertation addresses the question of how nineteenth-century scientific attitudes about animals were reflected in the literature of the period. By examining culture-texts from the nineteenth century, it is clear that literature was an active participant in extending scientific knowledge, often by playing with the blending categorical …

Unthinkable Conditions: Affect And Environment In Romanticism And Speculative Fiction, Amelia Z. Greene

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unthinkable Conditions bridges two literary periods and two theoretical modes in order to illustrate important parallels between historical periods and the writers who attempted to approach the changing environmental conditions of their respective eras. Each chapter names and theorizes a unique form of feeling which then serves as a framework for eco-affective analysis, drawing from existing studies in the environmental humanities and in studies of affect in order to construct a hybrid theoretical model which more fully accounts for the work of the writer treated in each chapter. The central claim of this dissertation is that vital affective innovations accompany …

Postcapitalist Desert Visions From Earth To Anarres, David J. Goff

Theses and Dissertations

Human industrial and economic activity around the world—happening either directly in the global North (recall the coal-choked London of Dickens) or, increasingly, in (un)developing nations of the global South because of the North’s demand— has burned and pumped so much CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that climate has noticeably changed even over the span of a single generation. As long as the world and its people are held in the clutches of the hegemonic capitalist politico-economic system, the environment will continue to degrade, and so will life for all the people of Earth, especially those most vulnerable. …

Grappling With The Aftereffects Of Modernism In American Literature And Culture: Spiritual, Political, And Ecological, Joseph Neary

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

In this portfolio, Joe Neary examines various texts within contemporary American culture, including David Foster Wallace’s short story, “Good Old Neon,” Harmony Korine’s film, Spring Breakers, Richard Powers’ novel, The Overstory, and Bruce Holsinger’s book of criticism, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror.

Sanctuary Poetics And Contemporary Us Culture, Alex Howerton

Theses and Dissertations

Sanctuary Poetics and Contemporary US Culture argues that contemporary poets of color create spaces of safety, relation, and justice through the act of writing as resistance itself. Sanctuary Poetics discusses poetry responding to the myriad crises of our contemporary moment, and considers how poets, through formal techniques such as ekphrasis or synecdoche, envision moments of shelter and connection that provide necessary relief to imperiled populations. I introduce the idea of a sanctuary poetics through Amanda Gorman’s recent poem “The Hill We Climb,” performed at Joseph Biden’s inauguration. The first chapter covers citizenship and the work of the Undocupoets, a multiracial …

The Lodge In The Wilderness: Ecologies Of Contemplation In British Romantic Poetry, Sean M. Nolan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation argues that contemplation is often overlooked in studies of British Romantic poetry. By the late 1700s, changing commercial and agricultural practices, industrialism, secularization, and utilitarianism emphasizing industriousness coalesced to uproot established discourses of selfhood and leisure, and effected crises of individuation in Romantic poetry and poetics. Closely reading poems and writing about poetry composed between the 1780s and 1830s by William Cowper, George Crabbe, Robert Bloomfield, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Stuart Mill, I probe the relationship between aesthetic, ethical, and emotional responses to depictions of toil, idleness, and leisure. I argue that ecologies …

Broken Harts: Mourning The Human/Animal Divide In Shakespeare’S As You Like It And Wordsworth’S “Hart-Leap Well”, Jennifer Jourlait

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis compares the deer scenes in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well.” Both raise questions about man’s right to hunt animals with impunity. Shakespeare’s Jaques superficially takes up the issue of animal rights whereas Wordsworth’s personification of the stag evokes the reader’s sympathy for the animal.

Disaster And Hope In The Comic Universe Of 'Gardening In The Tropics', Molly Mosher

Dissertations and Theses

In this paper, I explore ideas of dominion and how Western canon has helped propagate ideas of human domination of the natural world. Using Joseph W. Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, I trace a line from the advent of the literary tragedy to the climate crisis. To contrast, I use his idea of comedy as the antidote to domination — a way of thinking that might inspire collaboration with the natural world. I will explore the comic with, predominately, Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics, alongside Jamaica Kincaid’s gardening studies and Mona Lisa Saloy’s essay on environmental destruction. To …

A Foray Into The Camp: Human And Ecological Liberation In Contemporary Queer Conversion Therapy Literature, Mitchel Jurasek

Honors Projects

Through the analysis of two contemporary conversion therapy novels in North America, this project explores the intersections of biopolitics (specifically camp theory), queer theory, ecocriticism, and YA literature. Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Nick White’s How to Survive a Summer are paired with scholars such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Joshua Whitehead, Greta Gaard, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Claudio Minca, Catriona Sandilands, Luce Irigaray, and Michael Marder to create a complex and intricate understanding of how ecologies impact queer youths’ experience in conversion therapy camps. The effect of such an intersectional and ecological understanding of queer becomings …

Wisdom From The Collard Field: Exploring Agrarian Community In Twenty And Twenty-First Century American Literature, Robert M. Gorum

Theses and Dissertations--English

This dissertation surveys agrarian literature written by American writers since World War II. It compares the Southern Agrarians of Vanderbilt University and New Agrarians such as Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and Gene Logsdon to examine their understanding of place and home. I begin my inquiry with a personal frame story of time I have spent in and around the sustainable agriculture movement. Drawing on various forms of literature, including memoirs, cookbooks, novels, reportage, and other scholarship, I explore American ideals since World War II relating to the production and consumption of food.

I begin my opening chapter with a reassessment …

Lifeglows Through The Anthropocene: Development Of The Radical Imagination And Response-Ability Within Superhero Comics, Reed G. Puc

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Scholars such as Amitav Ghosh, Timothy Clark, and Timothy Morton emphasize the importance of and challenge within the task of representing the power, scope, and scale of climate change in art and literature. These interrogations often emphasize the failures of extant works to animate their viewers towards action in a time of environmental crisis, but struggle to find any work that meets their expectations. This ‘game-over’ attitude, I argue, is the direct result of the cruel optimism present in the current scholarship’s attachment to ‘traditional’ forms of art and literature. By interrogating the conclusions Ghosh reaches about the novel’s function …

Imagining Wildernesses: Susan Howe’S Poetic Corrective, Samantha R. Walsh

Theses and Dissertations

This work explores language poet Susan Howe’s conceptualization of the natural world in her 1989 poem, Thorow. Conceptualization of a distinct and pure wilderness, inherited from Puritan settlers, is traced through Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and located in Howe’s experience at Lake George in 1987. This thesis describes Howe’s efforts to decolonize and open up closed historical narratives. Howe’s careful deconstruction of normative linguistic structures exposes the restrictive nature of standard syntax and canonical narratives.

Landscape, Gender, And The Politics Of Belonging In Thomas Hardy’S The Woodlanders And Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Sarah Dickerson

Master’s Theses

In my thesis, I analyze Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), exploring the way that Hardy’s depictions of both landscape and gender are interwoven to illuminate the larger issue of belonging as a central concern for his characters. I argue that in these two novels, we can analyze how one’s belonging to a physical environment and performative gender role directly relate to characters’ tragedy or success in the narratives. Characters who challenge normalized gender roles and characters whose place attachment manifests in natural rather than social spaces, endure worse tragedies than their gendered insider and …

“Out Of The Mother . . . And Home To The Mother”: Essays On Medieval Literature And Climate Crisis, Rachel Kuhr Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Road Trippin': Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives From On The Road To The Road, Scott M. Obernesser

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Road Trippin:’ Twentieth-Century American Road Narratives and Petrocultures from On The Road to The Road" examines late-twentieth century U.S. road narratives in an effort to trace the development of American petrocultures geographically and culturally in the decades after World War II. The highway stories that gain popularity throughout the era trace not simply how Americans utilize oil, but how the postwar American oil ethos in literature, film, and music acts upon and shapes human interiority and vice versa. Roads and highways frame my critique because they are at once networks of commerce transportation and producers of a unique, romantic …

Material Disease: Agency And Illness In Early American Literature, Mariah Crilley

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Material Disease: Agency and Illness in Early American Literature argues that diseases shaped bodies of literature. Drawing on new materialism, disability studies, and the medical humanities, this dissertation argues that diseases were material and literary agents that transformed not only individual bodies and lives but also cultures, history, and even literature. In each chapter, I explore how one disease impacted a particular genre or paradigm: syphilis and the natural history, smallpox and the body politic, yellow fever and the novel, dysentery and sensibility, and malaria and narratives of Western expansion. By emphasizing disease’s material and literary agency, by conjoining the …

Beauty And The Beasts: Making Places With Literary Animals Of Florida, Haili A. Alcorn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Place theory examines the relationship between human identity and physical locations, asking how meaningful attachments are formed between people and the spots they visit or in which they live. Literature of place exhibits this relationship and the myriad ways humans connect to their environment through storytelling, both fictional and nonfictional. Florida literature, an emerging and dynamic genre, features characters, cultures, and histories heavily embedded in place. Florida’s places also abound with animal presences, and literature about Florida almost always illustrates significant human-animal interactions that drive plots and character development. Therefore, Florida literature invites consideration of how animals influence human attachment …

Something Rotten: Space, Place, And The Nation In Hamlet And As You Like It, Mikaela Lafave

English MA Theses

Ecocriticism has been defined as literature that concretely concerns the environment, which can be obviously applied to those of Shakespeare’s that directly depict natural disaster. This creates a prototype of a Shakespearean Ecocritical canon. My thesis addresses the limitation of this initial definition, and applies ecocritical theory to other works by Shakespeare. Ecocriticism is no longer confined to only the natural as critics expand the field through examinations of built environments and urban interaction with the natural. This widening of the field encourages the addition of further Ecocritical Shakespeare. How can audiences see the unnatural as natural, and conversely the …

Environmental Deterioration In Contemporary Appalachian Literature: A Biblical Ecocritical Analysis Of Serena And Strange As This Weather Has Been, Alexandria C. Craft

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Ron Rash’s Serena and Ann Pancake’s Strange as This Weather Has Been are two contemporary Appalachian novels that have yet to be analyzed from a biblical ecocritical perspective. While some literary scholars acknowledge the environmental aspects of the novels, little of their research goes beyond examining the land and its resources as commodities or metaphorical extensions for the characters. In this thesis, I elaborate on those interpretations by scrutinizing the natural descriptions in both novels and comparing those findings to some of the landscapes and environmental verses located within the Bible. Unlike the pastoral ideal found in a portion of …