Rethinking Eco-purity:on Contemporary North American Anthropocene Fiction

This dissertation explores how contemporary North American Anthropocene fiction rethink the ideology of eco-purity,which has been haunting Western mainstream environmental discourse for decades.By investigating the ways certain environmental texts published in the 1990 s and early 21 st century(including Margaret Atwood's Madd Addam trilogy,T.C.Boyle's A Friend of the Earth and When the Killing's Done,Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior,Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being,Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140,and Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest)question,anatomize and go beyond the limitations of U.S.-based environmentalist traditions,this study argues that since the Anthropocene is becoming the living context shared by both human and nonhuman species,only after a critical revision of eco-purity can environmentalism better respond to the global ecological predicament and contribute to the sustainability of the planetary community.As dialogues between human beings and “postnature”,Anthropocene novels highlight the necessity of updating environmental discourse,capture the key problems blocking the progress of the environmental movement,and inspire new possibilities for environmental ethics and philosophy.The advent of the Anthropocene raises a crucial issue: if human society as a whole has turned into a geologic force transforming the Earth,how shall we approach this postnatural world largely shaped by anthropogenic activities,and,based on that,what kind of future can we create for it? For environmentalists,to ponder over this question would first mean interpreting from new perspectives the ever-intensifying,perplexing ecocrisis over the past fifty years,revisiting the ideological traditions of environmentalism,and locating the problematics surrounding the slow progress of the environmental cause.This dissertation maintains that there is a decisive chasm between the conventional idea of Nature as a pure,self-contained entity in opposition to human society and culture,and the entangling mesh of postnature,which stems from multiple agentic powers and is epitomized by climate change.Although the incentive to preserve the purity of nature largely accounts for the initial success of the Ecological Revolution in the 1960 s,it has gradually developed into an essentialist eco-purist mindset that dominates contemporary environmental politics.The ideology of eco-purity sticks to the legitimacy of a pure nature ideal,stresses mutual exclusion and opposition,and attempts to solve environmental problems by way of simplistic,linear thinking.Ecopurist beliefs are unable to grasp the environmental status quo of the Anthropocene,or to imagine how Homo sapiens may work with it constructively.As a form of artistic expression,literature interprets and evaluates the workings of the material world,scrutinizes the human condition,and explores humanness via creative representation.Literary imagination,along with other social and cultural texts,constitutes the ideology and discourse through which people approach reality,thus participating in the construction of social history.American environmental history tells us that literary works have been a fundamental part of modern environmental discourse.Just as the rise of the Anthropocene concept demands new forms of environmental writing,some contemporary fictional works have been making incisive responses.The world they delineate is a complex,hybrid socio-natural continuum in continuous formation,which exposes the fallacy of the old “return-to-nature” complex and sketches pictures of humans' coexistence with postnature at the same time.Of course,Anthropocene novels are shaped by environmentalist conventions,but more importantly,they deconstruct the latter's problematic beliefs,strategies and logic,thereby joining,as literary language,in widescale negotiations for more desirable socio-natural relations.Embracing the opportunities and challenges in this process,they invite us to reevaluate the world and ourselves.By juxtaposing literary and non-literary texts and focusing on their cross-pollination,this interdisciplinary research aims to discover the novel's role in deconstructing old environmental discourse and adapting it to the postnatural condition.Surrounding its subject matter,this inquiry raises three sub-questions.To begin with,what are the hallmarks of mainstream environmental discourse whose outdatedness makes them unpopular with the public,and how do Anthropocene novels represent them? Flight Behavior,When the Killing's Done and A Friend of the Earth portray the “good environmentalist” of the contemporary West with a simultaneously ironic and sympathetic touch,criticizing the environmental movement's three typical troubling mindsets.Firstly,an overreliance on the enlightening function of expert knowledge results in environmentalists' strongly didactic tendency.These novels reveal,however,that there is no necessarily straightforward connection between scientific authority and environmental action;meanwhile,“objective” scientific knowledge itself always carries a cultural weight.Secondly,conventional environmental concerns usually smack of a moralistic elitism featuring the image of a solitary,ascetic warrior who fights against a hostile,antienvironmental world.By depicting sanctimonious but somewhat self-conscious environmental heroes,the novels point out that the individualistic,quasi-religious preoccupation with nature fantasy not only hides from view the ambiguities that characterize human-nonhuman interactions,but also fails to address environmental justice issues.The third problem is environmental imagination's pervasive affective mode of gloom-and-doom rhetoric,which tends to be more debilitating than enabling in the Anthropocene.While these novels are shaped by the classic eco-tragedy narrative template,they can also get rid of its demerits to some degree.Both in form and content,the authors balance between strong environmental concern and the negative affects produced by ecodoom scenarios,thereby revising ecodystopianism effectively.The second question is: how do Anthropocene novels shed light on the common logic underlying these environmentalist hallmarks? Texts like When the Killing's Done,A Friend of the Earth,the Madd Addam trilogy and New York 2140 cut right through the two-fold oppositional logic embodied in radical and institutionalized environmentalisms' uncritical defense of Nature,uncovering the fundamental paradox of the modern environmental movement: while it incorporates Nature into the framework of liberation and rights discourse to carry out political and cultural protest against modernity,it exactly inherits the exclusionary,oppositional and hierarchical logic of modern thinking.To be exact,environmentalists victimize nature and condemn humanity,constructing out of the former a cultural weapon symbolizing purity,justice and truth so as to criticize industrial capitalism.Nevertheless,by retextualizing the environmentalist recovery narrative's quest for Edenic nature and the classic wilderness fantasy's obsession with primitivity,the novels indicate that environmentalism,while it defines itself as the enemy of modernity,exactly duplicates the modern mechanism of “purification”.In particular,these works emphasize how the advocacy of nonhuman nature gets involved in ideological wars so often seen in social protests so far.Nature is naturalized,turning into an unfailing discursive tool in power play that justifies certain political standpoints and speaks for special interests.In this way,the exclusion and denial of the unnatural leads to both misanthropy and the conflicts inside the environmentalist camp.Nature thus becomes an obstacle to grasping the true human condition in the Anthropocene,the imbrication of the human and the nonhuman in postnature.It is suggested that driven by such an eco-purist outlook,the environmental movement can only grow increasingly narrow.A dialectic understanding of environmentalism is needed for carrying out effective reform.Lastly,what are the ways in which Anthropocene fiction can go beyond eco-purity and help construct forms of new,forward-looking environmentalism? This research holds that a more comprehensive understanding of the role of the anthropos in the Anthropocene is the prerequisite for updating environmental discourse.With an integrated interpretation of this role,Through the Arc of the Rain Forest,Flight Behavior,A Tale for the Time Being and New York 2140 outline a postnatural environmental ethic that is novel,inclusive,and dialogic.On the one hand,they reiterate the significance of revisiting such epistemological categories as culture and nature,human and nonhuman,subject and object: by imagining postnatural otherness that is ultimately beyond the human ken,they expel the disturbing notion that the Anthropocene speaks for human exceptionalism.On the other hand,they explore how human beings' self-knowledge can be renewed: taking into consideration the rational and experiential systems by which people grasp reality,these novels affirm the productivity of human agency,and fictionalize multispecies futures characterized by complexity and openness,uncertainty and hope.Viewing postnature as a working field for members of the mesh,they sketch a form of non-anthropocentric humanism,which listens attentively to more-than-human voices while fully recognizing the creativity and fallibility of humankind.Regarding the tension and ambivalence in between with a sober hope,Anthropocene novels transcend eco-purity and work toward the dissolvement of simplistic dualisms.The storyworlds created by these authors are by no means pure,but messy and ambiguous,intricate and beautiful,vibrant and vivid.As one of the most profound responses to the postnatural context,Anthropocene environmental literature is abundant with philosophical deliberations that can open new spaces for contemporary environmentalism and contribute to the earth community's collective survival in the Anthropocene.