English Language and Literature ETDs
Publication Date
Spring 4-15-2019
Abstract
This study demonstrates how American literary naturalism, roughly between 1870-1910, and U.S. print culture more generally, projected an aesthetics of (dis)integration. The term (dis)integration is particularly useful in thinking through the ways traumatic and disintegrative episodes coordinate and integrate U.S. publics. I periodize this work in the turn-of-the-century because it was then that realist literature coincides with the expansion of the national press and new media technologies like photography and film, all of which facilitated the widespread dissemination of crisis narratives, marking the period as the advent of what is popularly referred to as disaster culture in the United States. Through these technologies, I further argue that social and environmental crises underwent a widespread cultural sublimation into entertainment commodities and thereby normalized statist socioeconomic control. I apply the logic of social ecology to critique how U.S. literary naturalism and print culture responded to the naturalization and spectacle of poverty, addiction, racial violence, and natural disasters. My analysis also demonstrates how realist authors represent what I term negative ecologies, diegetic worlds characterized by replicative systems of social and environmental violence. I contend that literatures oriented to social activism only persevere beyond their own ideological constraints when they resist utopian visions and instead effectuate traumatic ambiguities that allow for the creative re-imagining of social futures.
Degree Name
English
Level of Degree
Doctoral
Department Name
English
First Committee Member (Chair)
Dr. Jesse Aleman
Second Committee Member
Dr. Scarlett Higgins
Third Committee Member
Dr. Jesus Costantino
Fourth Committee Member
Dr. Daniel Worden
Language
English
Keywords
naturalism, disaster, social ecology, poverty, addiction, racial violence
Document Type
Dissertation
Recommended Citation
Basso, Vincent M.. "By Talon and By Tooth: Disaster Culture, American Literary Naturalism, and the Aesthetics of (Dis)integration." (2019). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/266
