The simulation of nature: Contemporary American fiction in an environmental context (Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, Mike Davis)

The dissertation is an examination of how nature is socially constructed in particular texts of contemporary American Fiction. In discussing the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, and Jonathan Franzen, and the non-fiction of Mike Davis, I argue that their works accurately depict how nature is created because they recognize the idea of nature as a textual artifact. Fully aware of their textual limitations, these works acknowledge and foreground the ontological uncertainty present in their writing, embracing postmodern literary techniques to challenge the notion that “nature” is a tangible, stable, self-evident reality. They embrace the fictionality of language, admitting that any textual enterprise can only aspire to simulation.; The dissertation begins by exploring the simulated nature of Walt Disney's Animal Kingdom. In the hyperreality of the theme park, we can see that Disney's simulation of exotic nature reflects a reality defined by media images, myriad details that signify nature but never seem to equate to nature. Pynchon's Mason & Dixon explores the eighteenth-century border conflict between the age of miracles and the age of reason, a critique of the Enlightenment as seen from its crumbling twenty-first century edges. Franzen's Strong Motion mines similar territory as the novel reveals the deeply buried foundation on which we've structured our lives, a foundation that confines us to categories and hierarchies based on domination. Powers's Gain uses the intertwined narratives of the growth of a corporation and the death of a middle-aged mother to dramatize the reduction of all reality to an equation designed to maximize profit. Finally, Mike Davis's two books about Los Angeles suggest the apocalyptic future of nature. His Los Angeles is a postmodern world of chaos, non-linearity and fractal borders, a work of natural history depicted through the aesthetic lens of postmodernist fiction.; These eco-novelists are aware that reality becomes a matter of differing and competing worldviews. Underlying their concern with language and its ability to represent reality is an awareness that there is a nature that exists beyond language. Unlike most of their contemporaries, however, they refuse the illusion of defining a one, true nature.