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http://hdl.handle.net/11375/5671
Title: | Apocalypse Then and Now: Contemporary Narratives of Environmental Extinction |
Authors: | Lutz, Dieter Michael |
Advisor: | Granofsky, Ronald |
Department: | English |
Keywords: | English Language and Literature;English Language and Literature |
Publication Date: | Nov-2001 |
Abstract: | <p>My dissertation examines the heretofore unexamined dovetailing of concerns and motifs found in environmental, science-fiction, romantic, and post-apocalyptic narratives. In particular, I focus upon contemporary renderings of architectural ruins, vegetation, children, and depopulated landscapes. These broadly romantic tropes of the nineteenth century, I argue, are reworked in post-World War II fictions and writings to yield now commonplace ecological and post-apocalyptic motifs. Typically, post-cataclysmic landscapes are endowed with a sometimes uncanny fecundity, which can signal both healthy, consoling growth and also the dominion of a toxic, "postnatural" nature that is working to rid itself of humans and human infrastructures. The narratives I examine are, then, often poised between affirming an optimistic humanism and, perhaps unwittingly, a more nihilistic ideology, one which in some versions values non-anthropocentric ecology over urbanism and human life. As such, many of the narratives I examine anticipate contemporary forms of radical environmentalism.</p> |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/11375/5671 |
Identifier: | opendissertations/1018 1580 927150 |
Appears in Collections: | Open Access Dissertations and Theses |
Files in This Item:
File | Size | Format | |
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fulltext.pdf | 10.74 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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