Narrating American space: Literary cartography and the contemporary *Southwest

An ecological literary criticism faces the problem of how writing may access and represent the world. This dissertation argues that contemporary Southwestern narratives achieve an environmental writing through a practice of transformative geography. Environmental writing "maps" the world by drawing connections between topography, social groups, and historical forces to confront environmental politics in the era of postmodern compression of space and time, in part an effect of the nuclear age and a global economy. This compression threatens environmental integrity and cultural difference, and severely complicates notions of place. Transformative mapping opens up a narrative space in which bodies, minority groups, local landscapes, and post-national places are bound in shifting ecological relationships. The narrative mapping of these relationships, as distinct from a representational treatment of natural place, engages a postmodern ecology of global flows in which local or regional positions become central rather than marginal.;The first chapter exposes the neocolonial and polemical landscapes of Edward Abbey's fiction and nonfiction writing. In the second chapter I show how the re-mapping achieved by ethnic Southwestern authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Rudolfo Anaya reclaims this landscape as homeland in the service of cultural nationalisms. Chapter three reveals the way in which women authors like Terry Tempest Williams and Rebecca Solnit attempt to mediate between indigenous and settler cultures and between natural and cultural realms through the development of a paradoxical, chiasmic space. In chapter four I consider how Cormac McCarthy's radical Western novels engage in a self-conscious consideration of historiography and representation to map a Western history in light of cultural conflict and environmental degradation. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I argue that Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead maps a blueprint of an apocalyptic postnational future, founded on the reappropriation of indigenous lands, spreading from the Southwestern borderlands.