Waste sites: Rethinking nature, body, and home in American fiction since 1980.

摘要

Waste Sites: Rethinking Nature, Body, and Home in American Fiction Since 1980 examines U.S. novels of the late 20th century in an attempt to explore the ways in which novelists during these years represented our culture's radically changing relation to the environment. My premise, in focusing on fiction of this period, is that it was during the relatively brief period of the 1980s the we underwent a fundamental shift in historical consciousness. By the early 1990s, we had already crossed some unnamed boundary, were already living in a "postnatural" age, as Bill McKibben suggested in his 1980 book, The End of Nature.;It was during the 1980s that we collectively witnessed, comprehended and responded to this new phenomenon: that the sites in which we dwelled---nature, our bodies, our homes---were becoming utterly changed as a result of environmental contamination. This phenomenon was intensified by a new cultural attitude toward nature that placed it under the hegemony of culture. Consequently, our inherited conceptions of these dwelling sites became quickly obsolete, and our previous notions of nature, the body, and home were reconfigured. These nascent re-visions can be glimpsed in novels of the 1980s.;Fiction of this period is important in that it illuminates what might otherwise be a forgotten part of our cultural history. The novels of Don DeLillo, John Updike, Paule Marshall, John Gardner, William Gaddis, Margaret Atwood, Meridel Le Sueur, John Cheever, Saul Bellow and others reflect the radical ontological shift that we experienced during the 1980s and have perhaps already begun to forget in the cultural landscape of the 21st century. During the 1990s, novelists such as Helena Maria Viramontes, Richard Powers, and Ruth Ozeki continued to offer evolving representations of nature, the body, and home in relation to ecological contamination and environmental injustice. In focusing on fiction since 1980, I do not mean to suggest that a cultural and literary concern with ecological destruction is unique to this period---only that environmental contamination reached a sort of critical mass during the 1980s, both in absolute terms and in the extent of disruption to American culture.