VL Issues in American Literature: Nature and Technology (Winter 2024/25)
From Puritan constructions of wilderness to the colonization of Mars, the North American imaginary is fundamentally shaped by ambiguous and interconnected attitudes towards nature and technology. While ideas of “Nature” have been employed to both legitimize Indigenous displacement and anchor American constructions of freedom and self-reliance, visions of technology oscillate between fantasies of techno-utopia and deep-seated anxieties around ecological catastrophe and the disruptions of humanist subjectivity. Sketching a trajectory from the early modern period to the present, this survey lecture offers a framework for understanding the intersection of environmental and technological imaginaries as central to the development of North American literature and key to historicizing the cultural conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives from ecocriticism, critical posthumanism, and speculative fiction studies, we will explore the continuities and ruptures that lead from romanticist views of the sublime to Golden Age science fiction, from the figure of the pioneer to the engineer and space cowboy, from the environmental aesthetics of modernism to cyberpunk and ecological entanglement, from the machine age to the technosphere and climate fiction, from the colonial politics of wilderness to environmental justice movements and Indigenous futurism. With examples from a broad range of genres and modes (incl. nonfiction essays, poetry, novels, short stories, film, and music), we will revisit key stages of the North American literary tradition and explore critical dialogues with decolonial and feminist critiques of North American progress narratives and poetics of environmental placemaking.
From Puritan constructions of wilderness to the colonization of Mars, the North American imaginary is fundamentally shaped by ambiguous and interconnected attitudes towards nature and technology. While ideas of “Nature” have been employed to both legitimize Indigenous displacement and anchor American constructions of freedom and self-reliance, visions of technology oscillate between fantasies of techno-utopia and deep-seated anxieties around ecological catastrophe and the disruptions of humanist subjectivity. Sketching a trajectory from the early modern period to the present, this survey lecture offers a framework for understanding the intersection of environmental and technological imaginaries as central to the development of North American literature and key to historicizing the cultural conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives from ecocriticism, critical posthumanism, and speculative fiction studies, we will explore the continuities and ruptures that lead from romanticist views of the sublime to Golden Age science fiction, from the figure of the pioneer to the engineer and space cowboy, from the environmental aesthetics of modernism to cyberpunk and ecological entanglement, from the machine age to the technosphere and climate fiction, from the colonial politics of wilderness to environmental justice movements and Indigenous futurism. With examples from a broad range of genres and modes (incl. nonfiction essays, poetry, novels, short stories, film, and music), we will revisit key stages of the North American literary tradition and explore critical dialogues with decolonial and feminist critiques of North American progress narratives and poetics of environmental placemaking.