Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Comparative Literature
First Advisor
Fradinger, Moira
Abstract
This dissertation is about the creation of a new environmental imagination. Under the pressure of ecological crisis, dominant ways of distinguishing nature and society have faltered, and struggles for environmental justice have articulated demands for a biocentric, anti-colonial approach to environmental governance. I show how such an ideological transition might be accomplished in the areas of law and literature, two crucial sources of new environmental worldviews and norms. My focus is on novels and jurisprudence that deal with ongoing environmental struggles: in the United States West, I look to William Vollmann’s The Dying Grass (2015), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), and cases from the Standing Rock pipeline standoff; in the Peruvian Amazon, I study Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Green House (1965), César Calvo’s The Three Halves of Ino Moxo (1981), and a 2016 criminal court case adjudicating a violent conflict over oil exploration in the rainforest; finally, I examine Ursula K. Le Guin’s series of speculative fiction novels in the Hainish Cycle (1966-2000) and what I consider the “speculative law” project of the rights of nature movement. By presenting the law as a crucial imaginative source (and foil) for writers’ and activists’ programs of improved environmental relations, I argue that narrative plays an important role in environmental regulation and resistance.
Recommended Citation
Hamilton, Joseph, "Imagining a Crisis: Human-Environmental Relations in North and South American Law and Literature" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 706.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/706