Environmental Memory and the Realist American Novel in an Age of Climate Crisis
Date of Award
Fall 2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Cleary, Joseph
Abstract
In the final decades of the twentieth century, emergent discourses about environmental crisis began to unsettle familiar modes by which many in the United States understood and represented their relations to the more-than-human world. As ecological challenges intensified and new threats emerged, conventional forms of environmental writing – largely those derived from Anglo-American traditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – could no longer accommodate the problems or adequately express the anxieties facing the new era. This dissertation considers how authors, active primarily in the United States from the 1970s to the early 2000s, reworked significant genres of the American novel and tropes of environmental writing in light of these new discourses and geosocial developments. In doing so, it proposes that the so-called literary novel continues to offer a dynamic medium of environmental imagining in the Anthropocene. Questions concerning realist representation and environmental crisis have long animated ecocritical discourses. In recent decades, many scholars have turned to genres like science fiction and climate fiction, celebrating the ways in which those forms can represent environmental crisis in a manner that exceeds the capacities of realist works. However, in this dissertation, I show how realist novels continue to offer vital perspectives on the more-than-human world and the crises that face it. They do so, I argue, by representing what I call environmental memory, a narrative mode that illuminates how place-based histories shape the natural and built environments of the present. Reading works by Don DeLillo, William Least Heat-Moon, Jamaica Kincaid, Marilynne Robinson, Pat Cadigan, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others, I suggest that attending to place-based memory allows novelists to situate individual memories within the context of much wider and longer histories, to re-evaluate environmental crises in light of those histories, and, sometimes, to learn from the past in order to imagine alternative paths forward. As a dynamic vehicle for environmental memory, the realist novel offers a valuable glimpse into rapidly-changing American perceptions of the more-than-human world in times of crisis, and can function as a resource for environmental understanding and environmental justice. Each chapter of this dissertation explores a different site – road, lake, cyberspace, and park – at which novelists critiqued and reworked a particular nineteenth- or mid-twentieth-century literary form or trope, from the road novel to the Romantic nature poem to the Transcendental treatise to the national park narrative. Chapter One argues that authors like Don DeLillo, Cynthia Kadohata, and William Least Heat-Moon reworked the midcentury American road novel in a time of oil crisis, producing novels that are more concerned with an anxious future than a boisterous and liberated present. Chapter Two considers how novelists like Jamaica Kincaid and Marilynne Robinson reimagine a Wordsworthian “nature feeling” to new ends as they represent lakes as sites at which to trace the residues of personal and imperial traumas. Chapter Three contends that cyber novels by Pat Cadigan, David Brin, and William Gibson portray cyberspace not as a futuristic, disembodied realm, but rather as a site of environmental nostalgia, rethinking an Emersonian transcendentalism and yearning for older modes of relating to the non-human world even as they celebrate the placelessness of the new virtual realm. Chapter Four suggests that novels by Joyce Carol Oates, Shelton Johnson, and Nina Revoyr exemplify a new genre that I call the “American park novel,” which emplots national parks with histories of Indigenous displacement, industrialization, and environmental racism rather than merely celebrating sublime wilderness as did figures like John Muir. At all of these sites, untangling environmental memory does not produce a yearning for a pre-modern or pre-industrial past. Rather, grappling with memory allows these realist novels to think critically about environmental issues in the present and to conceive of alternative modes of life in uncertain times. The novels in this dissertation were largely produced before the planet-spanning term “Anthropocene” was coined. I read this as an invitation to consider how authors responded to, and tried to make sense of, a bewildering commingling of environmental crises in the decades before such challenges were beginning to be discussed as a single – if deeply multifaceted – problem. The realist novels that I study engage with environmental issues in surprising and non-prescriptive ways, and it is this indeterminacy that makes them unique and valuable as carriers of environmental memory and as literary experiments. In their ability to document and explore the slowly-accruing and persistent nature of environmental memories that continue to shape the material and affective landscapes of the present, these realist novels provide valuable insights into the intimate, daily, non-spectacular forms of material and mnemonic accumulation that determine how individuals and groups cohabit the present and imagine possible futures.
Recommended Citation
Hill, Anna Aurora, "Environmental Memory and the Realist American Novel in an Age of Climate Crisis" (2022). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 801.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/801
