| This dissertation argues that the literature of the American Southwest is a critical gauge of America's historic relationship to major environmental changes. Other regional literature may have borne similar responsibility, but the Southwest as a particularly malleable socio-environmental space is repeatedly engaged as the most significant landscape of catastrophic environmental thinking.;While most ecocritical studies of Southwest literature take an ahistorical view, my project attends to evolving discourses of nature with respect to collapse, change, and recuperation. In charging the Southwest with the burden of displaying and displacing our conceptions of environmental illness, I explore how negotiated patterns of recognition and response---a drive to make human and natural interactions intelligible---are significant tropes around which the environmental imagination of the Southwest coheres. Thus, I explore how representations of the Southwest revise, challenge, or reproduce various contemporary environmentally-oriented ideologies in circulation. The authors I address do not come to uniform conclusions, though they variously address explicit performances of willful delay and denial, painful adaptation, and amnestic recuperation.;This discussion aims to reorient the generally anthropocentric understanding of Southwestern recovery narratives by considering how human and environmental health and illness intersect to create a complex ecology of place. The negotiation of what constitutes socio-ecological well-being is where my study employs the critical field of Science Studies. I depend on work by historians Franz Keulartz and Dana Philips for their archaeology of environmental knowledge. This historical analysis allows for an examination of a representative range of large-scale environmental changes: agricultural concerns which occupied nineteenth-century writers Zebulon Pike, Susan Shelby Magoffin, James Fenimore Cooper, and Josiah Gregg; the destruction of native landscape and lifeways expressed in terms of socio-environmental adaptations in the autobiography of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins; Cormac McCarthy's focus on violence, extinction, and sustainability along the U.S./Mexico border region; and issues of toxicity and social disintegration which define Leslie Marmon Silko's environmental investigations. While some of the texts under consideration in this dissertation have been discussed from other environmental frames of reference, I show how these writers wrestle with a particular stripe of American exceptionalism I am calling environmental perfectionism. |
