| "Trouble with Time" examines environmental time as a recurring dramatic concern of contemporary American literature treating environmental crisis. Investigating fiction and non-fiction texts, from autobiography and the ethnic Bildungsroman to postmodern and science fiction novels, I argue that representations of environmental time dramatically restructure familiar narratives in order to imagine how invisible, long-term hazards such as toxicity and radiation transform human experiences of time and history, subjectivity and agency. This dissertation tests academic claims that globalization has foreshortened time-space horizons to the point that people are now incapable of long-term perspectives and of conceiving themselves as historical beings. It also challenges place-based environmental connection and advocacy found in popular culture and, more surprisingly, in ecocriticism as well.;The dissertation first addresses the cognitive challenge of environmental crisis, showing how these works make invisible, time-delayed environmental hazards like toxicity and radiation appear. The second part addresses the political challenge of the long term, interpreting how these works dramatize new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. These texts imagine a time change in our lives and stories where the short---the time of mental and bodily processes, character development, and the narrative works representing them such as autobiography and the novel---is re-articulated in relation to the long: the life spans of toxins and radioactive elements; the processes of entropy, evolution, and natural history; and slow drama forms like the natural history epic. This time change creates new aggregate configurations---new bodies, new lives, and new stories---whose formal dimensions have important political implications and literary interest.;Comparing these texts reveals that when the short-term perspective that is biologically, subjectively, and culturally normative for humanity is not preserved, it is difficult to imagine effective agency at that level. This is true even when such perspectives are to blame for environmental hazard creation. Critical attention to representations of environmental time in works from Solar Storms to Gravity's Rainbow, from Body Toxic to Underworld, and from Refuge to Schismatrix reveals it to be more central to narratives and identities than previously imagined and leads to new ways of reading the contemporary novel and autobiography. |
