Wild abandon : American literature and the identity politics of ecology / Alexander Menrisky.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Menrisky, Alexander, author.

Series:

Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ; 185.

Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ; 185

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Human ecology in literature.

Identity politics in literature.

Environmentalism in literature.

Ecology in literature.

Literature and society--United States--History--20th century.

Literature and society.

Psychoanalysis and literature--United States.

Psychoanalysis and literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 254 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Summary:

The American wilderness narrative, which divides nature from culture, has remained remarkably persistent despite the rise of ecological science, which emphasizes interconnection between these spheres. Wild Abandon considers how ecology's interaction with radical politics of authenticity in the twentieth century has kept that narrative alive in altered form. As ecology gained political momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, many environmentalists combined it with ideas borrowed from psychoanalysis and a variety of identity-based social movements. The result was an identity politics of ecology that framed ecology itself as an authentic identity position repressed by cultural forms, including social differences and even selfhood. Through readings of texts by Edward Abbey, Simon Ortiz, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Jon Krakauer, among others, Alexander Menrisky argues that writers have both dramatized and critiqued this tendency, in the process undermining the concept of authenticity altogether and granting insight into alternative histories of identity and environment.

Contents:

Modern environmentalism's identity politics. Ecological authenticity and the wilderness narrative

The uses of dissolution

A literary history of environmentalist identity politics

The ecological alternative : civilization, selfhood, and environment in the 1960s. Selfhood and civilization : the new left and beyond

The (in)authentic anarchist : the self in postwar environmental writing

The spontaneous society : ecology and the politics of self-liberation

"Feeling like a river" : Edward Abbey's subjective uncertainty

Social ecology and psychoanalytic vocabulary

The superficial self

The entheogenic landscape: psychedelic primitives, ecological Indians, and the American counterculture. The countercultural psyche

Peter Matthiessen's psychedelics of water, wind, and stone

"The hallucinogenic oceans of the mind" from east to west

Psychedelic primitivism's presymbolic myth

Simon Ortiz, oral tradition, and environmental justice

Narrative, self, and environment

The universal wilderness : race, cultural nationalism, and an identity politics for the state of nature. The new universalism : environmentalism beyond natural rights

Cultural nationalism and racial authenticity

Racial particularity and ecological authenticity : a reflective stalemate

Toni Morrison's skeptical state of nature : race, gender, and wilderness

An admission of fabrication

A brief comment on community and environment

The essential ecosystem : reproduction, network, and biological reduction. Surfacing's identity crises : gender and nature in the 1970s

Depth and nature feminism

"The first true human" : narcissistic fantasy and material complexity

Depth and network

New materialisms, old narratives

An appeal to obliteration

The death of the supertramp : psychoanalytic narratives and American wilderness. Characterizing Chris McCandless

Depth and deep ecology

The ascetic superhero's boast

Into the wild's Freudian narrative

Fatal dissolutions

The neoliberal wilderness

Ecological consistency.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 14 Dec 2020).

ISBN:

1-108-90526-9

1-108-90625-7

1-108-90995-7

OCLC:

1243546639