| My dissertation argues that the work of Robert Frost, Zora Neale Hurston, George W. Lee, John Steinbeck, and Jane Smiley exposes human anxieties about agriculture and the environment in light of complex interpenetrations of globalization across the twentieth century.; Responding to an undertheorization of agriculture in American literary studies generally and in ecocriticism particularly, my dissertation combines cultural studies and ecocriticism for its theoretical underpinning, using literature as a touchstone for exploring the sites of intersection of agricultural history and science and environmental studies fundamental to twentieth-century constructions of America. Frost's urban-industrial narratives of chicken farming, for example, gesture toward the liquidation of rural culture and local space, while Hurston's and Lee's treatments of sharecropping manifest diametrically opposed responses to racial, environmental, and cultural subjectivity. Steinbeck's fiction of transagricultural California demonstrates the postmodern insufficiency of Edenic myth as a response to national cultural and environmental problems, much as Smiley's postmodern postmortem of American nature and farming lays bare the need for a counter-visionary brand of American agrarianism in an intricately global, multiethnic world. These depictions of agriculture, culture, and the environment deconstruct critical understandings of pastoral and georgic discourses and thus reimagine the categories of "local" and "global." Such deconstructions and reimaginations work toward complicating critical understandings of the relationship of literature and culture to space and place. My readings of these texts are founded on archival research in the special collections of the National Agricultural Library, Iowa State University, and the Memphis/Shelby County Library and Public Information Center, as well as through participation in a short course in natural systems agriculture at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas.; In sum, my dissertation offers a reconceptualization of pastoral and georgic, country and city, and nation and world in twentieth-century American literature. Using ecocriticism and cultural studies, my work employs archival research to assert that a deeper understanding of agriculture, culture, and the environment revises contemporary conceptualizations of agrarianism, environmentalism, and globalization. |
