Full metadata
Title
From Frankenstein to District 9: ecocritical readings of classic and contemporary fiction and film in the anthropocene
Description
From Frankenstein to District 9: Ecocritical Readings of Classic and Contemporary Fiction and Film demonstrates how American studies methodologies, ecological literary criticism, and environmental justice theory provide both time-tested and new analytical tools for reading texts from transnational perspectives. Recently, American literary scholars have been responding to calls for collective interdisciplinary response to widening social disparities and species collapses caused by climate change in the new epoch recently being termed "the anthropocene." In response, I analyze canonical texts, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in juxtaposition with Neill Blomkamp's South African science fiction thriller District 9 and contemporary US American novels such as Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses and Richard Power's Generosity and The Echo Maker, to show how writers, filmmakers, and academics have been calling attention to dramatic climate events that consequently challenge the public to rethink the relationships among human beings to other species, and to ecological systems of low predictability, high variability, and frequent extremes. Rather than focusing solely on the "human," I examine how the relationships and livelihoods of multi-species communities shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces. As a whole, this dissertation seeks to make abstract, often intangible global patterns and concepts accessible by providing models for what I call "readings in the anthropocene" or re-readings of classic and contemporary texts and film that offer insights into changing human behavior and suggesting alternative management practices of local and global commons as well as opportunities to imagine how to live in and beyond the anthropocene.
Date Created
2015
Contributors
- Turner, Kyndra (Author)
- Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor)
- Lussier, Mark (Committee member)
- Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member)
- Arizona State University (Publisher)
Topical Subject
Resource Type
Extent
ii, 137 pages
Language
eng
Copyright Statement
In Copyright
Primary Member of
Peer-reviewed
No
Open Access
No
Handle
https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.I.29767
Statement of Responsibility
by Kyndra Turner
Description Source
Viewed on July 6, 2015
Level of coding
full
Note
thesis
Partial requirement for: Ph. D., Arizona State University, 2015
bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 129-137)
Field of study: English
System Created
- 2015-06-01 08:07:03
System Modified
- 2021-08-30 01:29:40
- 3 years 2 months ago
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