Description
Book SynopsisDeserts are highly emblematic spaces: dry, barren, isolated. In literary and cinematic representations, they often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offer readings of literature set in the US Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. The volume explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art. The authors, as well, trace the social, cultural, economic, and biotic narratives that foreground deserts, and how these underscore the challenges of climate change, ecojustice, and human and non-human flourishing. As such, the volume rethinks what deserts are and provides a constructive lens for seeing deserts as more than blank spaces, rather as ecogeographies that challenge, critique, and urge collective ecojustice action.
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Foreword: Desertification by Tom Lynch
Introduction: The Dry Time by Jada Ach and Gary Reger
Part I: Eco-Identities and Environmental Belonging in Arid America
Chapter 1: Imagined Deserts, Planned Communities, and Escape Pods in the American West by Amy T. Hamilton
Chapter 2: Aridity, Individualism, and Paradox in Elmer Kelton’s The Time it Never Rained by Quinn Grover
Chapter 3: Desert Haunting: A Gothic Reading of Arturo Islas’ The Rain God by Cordelia Barrera
Chapter 4: Imagining the Southwest in Willa Cather’s Frontier Novels: Settler Colonialism in The Song of the Lark, The Professor’s House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop by Zachary R. Hernandez
Part II: Desert Remains: Roads, Dams, and Discarded Pianos
Chapter 5: Desert Roads, “Construction Men,” and Infrastructural Impulses in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House by Jada Ach
Chapter 6: “It was the river”: Indigenous Anti-Dam Literature of the Great American Desert by Holly Jean Richard and Paul Formisano
Chapter 7: The Desert as Dumping Ground in Popular Imagination by Jennifer Dawes
Part III: Envisioning the Desert from Outside the West
Chapter 8: Trinitite, Turquoise, and Rattlesnakes: Envisioning the (De)Nuclearized Desert in the Works of Leslie Marmon Silko and Kyoko Hayashi by Kyoko Matsunaga
Chapter 9: Color, Place, and Memory in Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes by Celina Osuna
Chapter 10: French Travelers in the Arid Southwest by Gary Reger
Conclusion: Desert Dwelling by Ron Broglio
About the Contributors
Index
