Reading for the anthropocene : humanimality as resilience
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In this dissertation, I investigate what role literary thinking can have in helping to cultivate human resilience during the geological era known as the Anthropocene, a concept that designates the global environmental devastation that human systems have wrought. My particular focus is anthropogenic global warming, which I conceive of as a philosophical and physical existential crisis that demands a human response. My research participates in a multidisciplinary conversation that considers how to find ways to adapt to life and death on a changing planet. Literary thinking encompasses both a textual mode of creative production and a way of reading. I develop an ecologically attuned hermeneutic that decenters the human and pays attention to the ethical dimensions of scale and of the materiality of the humanimal body. I practice this hermeneutic, what I refer to in the title as "Reading for the Anthropocene, " on texts produced during what the environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert suggests we call the Age of the Emissions. My corpus begins in the Global North, with Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), and then moves to the Global South, with Cronwell Jara's Montacerdos (1981-2006) and Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar (2007). Although diverse in their genres, languages, and times and places of production, these texts all register a crisis of the human and respond to that upheaval in different ways. On one end, there is a denial of new relationality with more-than-human life because of the changes that relationality would require of and in the human; on the other end, there is an acceptance of material intra-action with more-than-human life accompanied by the cultivation of multispecies flourishing. Motivated by the belief that it matters how we tell ourselves the multidimensional stories of our past and future environmental impacts, the goal of this dissertation is to examine the way humanimality and other-than-human animalities have been described from the inception of modernity-coloniality and global warming to the twenty-first century. Utilizing decolonial, feminist materialist, and environmental humanities methodologies, I contend that literary thinking can teach us resilience by displaying how to reimagine the narratives of what humanimals can be and what humanimals can do in relation to our shared planet and our more-than-human neighbors who also live on it.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Valderrama, Patricia |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Degree supervisor | Hoyos Ayala, Héctor |
| Thesis advisor | Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich |
| Thesis advisor | Hoyos Ayala, Héctor |
| Thesis advisor | Briceño, Ximena |
| Thesis advisor | Saldívar, José David |
| Thesis advisor | Saldívar, Ramón, 1949- |
| Degree committee member | Briceño, Ximena |
| Degree committee member | Saldívar, José David |
| Degree committee member | Saldívar, Ramón, 1949- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Comparative Literature. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Patricia Valderrama. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Patricia Valderrama
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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