Toxic Discourse

English and American Literature and Languag

Downwardly Mobile for Conscience's Sake: Voluntary Simplicity from Thoreau to Lily Bart

English and American Literature and Languag

New Directions in (Transnational) American Literature Studies

Never has there been a better moment for foreign scholars outside the English-speaking world to engage in American literature studies. American literature studies is increasingly studied worldwide and the contributions of foreign-born and foreign-based Americanists are becoming increasingly influential. This lecture will attempt to explain this turn of events, with special emphasis on analysis of selected newer transnational and comparative approaches to American literature studies. Background factors contributing to the emergence of these new approaches will be surveyed briefly. These include the changing demography of American academia, the challenges to the traditional canon from within American literary studies of the 1970s and after, and the rise of new historicism, postcolonialism, and critical race studies. The lecture will concentrate especially, however, on defining the types of approach employed by the newer transnational Americanist scholarship. These will be illustrated by describing a number of recent books and articles that suggest the promise of these approaches. Five broad, overlapping initiatives will be defined: (1) author-focused studies that broaden the critical horizon of understanding beyond the scope of the national; (2) projects focusing on linguistic translation or cross-cultural communication; (3) studies of circulation of texts and cross-cultural influences within international zones (the Atlantic world, the transpacific world, the Americas); (4) projects that address cultural mobility on a global scale; and (5) ecocritical studies of transnational environmental interdependencies or affinities. Most, as we shall see, are quite heterogeneous. Within most we find considerable methodological diversity and debate.English and American Literature and Languag

What is Called Ecoterrorism

The perceived threat of ecological terrorism has become a major concern of environmental discourse during the past two decades and ominously shifted focus in the process. This neologism has been brandished as an epithet both from the “right,” in the first instance to stigmatize eco- and animal rights activism, and from the “left,” to stigmatize state and corporate-sponsored violence. The activists quickly lost this war of words, however, so that “ecoterrorism” discourse has become predominantly a rhetorical weapon not only against radicals but sometimes even mainstream reformist initiatives. Through the lens of literary history, the shift is encapsulated by the genesis and reception of two novels: Edward Abbey’s cult classic The Monkey-Wrench Gang (1975), a catalytic inspiration for the Earth First! Movement but later a poster-child for right-wing critics of “ecoterrorism”; and Michael Crichton’s eco-thriller State of Fear (2004), in which an eco-radical organization figures as a satanic adversary secretly deployed by a supposedly respectable mainstream environ-mental group. It might seem that 9/11 would have played a crucial role in putting what one political theorist has called “resistance citizenship” on the defensive. But that is less true than one might suppose from the claims usually made for 9/11’s world-historical import. In this case, the “zero hypothesis” rejected by Jean Baudrillard (9/11 made no appreciable difference in the world power structure) seems broadly true. The deeper cultural logic of this irony is then explored, with reference to the long tradition of conspiracy phobia in U.S. history, as well as the political thought of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and others. I then return to the question of how radical ecotheory’s ethical paradigms might abet overreaction rejected by Baudrillard and conclude with some reflections on the possible future(s) of eco-resistance citizenship.English and American Literature and Languag

What Is Called Ecoterrorism

The perceived threat of ecological terrorism has become a major concern of environmental discourse during the past two decades and ominously shifted focus in the process. This neologism has been brandished as an epithet both from the "right," in the first instance to stigmatize eco- and animal rights activism, and from the "left," to stigmatize state and corporate-sponsored violence. The activists quickly lost this war of words, however, so that "ecoterrorism" discourse has become predominantly a rhetorical weapon not only against radicals but sometimes even mainstream reformist initiatives. Through the lens of literary history, the shift is encapsulated by the genesis and reception of two novels: Edward Abbey's cult classic The Monkey-Wrench Gang (1975), a catalytic inspiration for the Earth First! Movement but later a poster-child for right-wing critics of "ecoterrorism"; and Michael Crichton's eco-thriller State of Fear (2004), in which an eco-radical organization figures as a satanic adversary secretly deployed by a supposedly respectable mainstream environ-mental group. It might seem that 9/11 would have played a crucial role in putting what one political theorist has called "resistance citizenship" on the defensive. But that is less true than one might suppose from the claims usually made for 9/11's world-historical import. In this case, the "zero hypothesis" rejected by Jean Baudrillard (9/11 made no appreciable difference in the world power structure) seems broadly true. The deeper cultural logic of this irony is then explored, with reference to the long tradition of conspiracy phobia in U.S. history, as well as the political thought of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and others. I then return to the question of how radical ecotheory's ethical paradigms might abet overreaction rejected by Baudrillard and conclude with some reflections on the possible future(s) of eco-resistance citizenship

Anthropocene Panic: Contemporary Ecocriticism and the Issue of Human Numbers

Environmental humanists rightly believe they have valuable contributions to make to rethinking and redressing Anthropocene Age excess. Ecocriticism’s recent maturation as an interdiscipline has put it in a stronger position to do so than ever before. Its “material” turn in the 2000s bears this out up to a point, but its interventions also seem somewhat self-limiting. This essay argues that ecocritics and environmental humanists more generally have foregone a promising opportunity by avoiding the controversial issue of unsustainable human population growth as a sociohistorical phenomenon and an impetus to creative imagination.English and American Literature and Languag

The New England Renaissance and American Literary Ethnocentrism

Just as patriot orators invoked the spirit of Puritanism in their remonstrances against British tyranny, just as the nineteenth-century cult of Pilgrimism taught all America to look back upon the Pilgrim fathers as everyone's fathers, so modern American intellectual history has proclaimed the Puritan origins of the American way. The result has been a scholarly upsurge, during the past half-century, of “Puritan legacy” studies, of which Perry Miller was the prime mover and Sacvan Bercovitch is the leading contemporary theorist. So far as the interpretation of literary history is concerned, these studies have given a new authority and depth to the old New England-centered map of American literary tradition first drawn up by the Yankee-oriented genteel intellectual establishment of the late nineteenth century that presided over the literary institutions whose prestige had been built upon the reputation of the perpetrators of the antebellum New England Renaissance. The old-fashioned interpretation of American literary history and the new-fashioned interpretation of American civil religion as a nationalized version of Puritan ideology have combined to create a strong presumption, at least for specialists in New England Romantic literature, that theirs was the key formative moment in American literary history as a whole.English and American Literature and Languag

The unkillable dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as test case

English and American Literature and Languag

The Thoreauvian Pilgrimage: The Structure of an American Cult

Examines the forms of public reverence for American author Henry David Thoreau. Testimony of author John Muir; Focus on the theme of pilgrimage; Emphasis on the concept of Transcendental Concord.English and American Literature and Languag