Beyond Toxic Writing: An Ecocritical Reading Of Upton Sinclair’s Fiction

Pulitzer-Prize winner Upton Sinclair is generally known as one of the leading muckrakers and leftist authors in the first half of the 20th century America. As a most productive and devoted writer, Sinclair wrote up to 100 works with a variety of genres ranging from fiction, drama, essay to autobiography, among which the muckraking novels, designed to a critique of American capitalism in his time, represent his prominent literary achievements. Meanwhile, Sinclair is widely considered as an earnest political activist and socialist reformer. Not only did he promote social justice through literary creation but he actively participated in political practice as well.Upton Sinclair’s persistence in the pursuit of a combination and interaction of literary writing and political propaganda leads to the rise and fall of his literary position and a controversy of scholarly appraisal. Sinclair’s writings demonstrate the development of modernization in the early 20th century America through representations of pillar industry. He maps out the industrializing of social and cultural values in an era of social transformation, reveals a universal crisis rooted in the core of capitalism and employs a grand narrative with the aim of ecological reconstruction. No doubt Sinclair’s works are of contemporary significance.It is argued that the existing scholarship in Sinclair has mainly focused on a biographical, interdisciplinary and comparative mode trying to recanonize Sinclair. Thus, various attempts have been made to explore Upton Sinclair in relation to his world, thought, writing, art and impact. It is only of late time that a few critics have begun to observe his theme of ecoconcerns generating an ecocritical reading of his works. Chinese critics inquire about Sinclair’s influence on China’s leftist literature and the environmental determinism in his works. Recently, they have begun to turn their attention away from an ideological critique of Sinclair to a multidimensional view.The burgeoning of ecocriticism in the latter half of the 20th century offers an all-inclusive perspective for Sinclair study. The revival of research interests in Sinclair should be attributed to the ecological awareness and the sense of environmental justice embodied in his texts. Aiming at an ecological reevaluation of Sinclair’s works, the dissertation undertakes an analysis of Upton Sinclair’s documentary novels The Jungle, King Coal, The Coal War, Oil! and Boston, all based on real historical events. The study positions Sinclair’s texts in an ecological framework incorporating the theory of crisis, the principles of eco-socialism and the theory of environmental justice. The dissertation argues that Upton Sinclair owes the conflicts between human beings and nature to the hierarchy system and the concept of domination. His critique is by no means rested on an attack but is directed to a reconstruction of socialist ideals.The layout of the main body runs three chapters, each chapter addressing respectively the revelation of ecological crisis, the construction of ecological harmony and the exploration of ecological implications. Chapter One mainly deals with The Jungle, Oil! and Boston to investigate the conflicts between human beings and their physical environment, cultural environment and social environment. Toxic discourse in The Jungle and the critique of economic reason in Oil! reveal the degradation by industrialization and capitalization in both wilderness and built nature, driven by man’s pursuit of nature’s instrumental value. The investigation of overconsumption and the declining of female spirit leads to the argument that human beings are materially and spiritually alienated. Moreover, Oil! and Boston further demonstrate that the domination of man is attained by means of marginalization of gendered and classed other, religious secularization, and standardization and homogeneity rendered by power politics and national violence. Chapter Two explores how Sinclair constructs his socialist ideals by a close reading of King Coal, The Coal War and Boston. It is argued that Sinclair’s socialism features the emphasis on environmental literacy, should-being anthropocentrism and egalitarianism, grassroots nonviolence and ecological co-operative. Chapter Three is to present the implications of the ecological perspective through The Jungle, King Coal and Boston. Sinclair identifies the quest of ecological self-realization with the dedication to social cause. In the process of it, he tries to achieve negotiations of literary and historical texts. Aesthetically speaking, the ugliness discourse attains the effect of ecological holism and environmental harmony.The dissertation reevaluates Sinclair’s works from an ecocritical perspective, but it is not confined to the approach, displaying its openness in terms of methodology as an interdisciplinary study. Set closely in his mores, Sinclair’s texts are provocative, exhibiting his strong social protest and radical criticism of his society. His revelation of ecological problems and views of reconstructing an ecological society have made Sinclair far better than a leftist writer. Approaching Sinclair’s fiction from an ecological perspective is expected to provide resource for ecocriticism and case study in expanding the boundary of literature.