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Dissertation 2.5 Copy University of Nevada, Reno Postlocal Ecocriticism: Place-Making in California’s Literary Landscape 1850-1999 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by William V. Lombardi Dr. Cheryll Glotfelty/Dissertation Advisor August 2016 Copyright by William V. Lombardi 2016 All Rights Reserved THE GRADUATE SCHOOL We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by WILLIAM V. LOMBARDI Entitled Postlocal Ecocriticism: Place-Making in California's Literary Landscape, 1850-1999 be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Cheryll Glotfelty, PhD, Advisor Michael P. Branch, PhD, Committee Member Katherine Fusco, PhD, Committee Member Paul F. Starrs, PhD, Committee Member C. Elizabeth Raymond, PhD, Graduate School Representative David W. Zeh, Ph. D., Dean, Graduate School August, 2016 !i Abstract This dissertation is an ecocritical project examining place-making strategies in a global age. Region and locality are presumed to be subordinate to the forces of globalization; as such, localist environmental practice has, in recent years, been perceived as short-sighted and provincial. Regional and environmental literary and cultural criticism have turned their attention to socio-environmental issues that are planetary in scope. Critics understand the problems of globalization as matters of scale. Contemporary criticism focuses on distance, on a separable and distinct near or far. Yet my survey of California literature since the Gold Rush reveals that in everyday practice place is the outcome of a simultaneous near-and-far. I call this condition “postlocal,” as opposed to the limited local and overdetermined global which an inordinate attention to scale predict. I argue for a clearer understanding of locality that accounts for the resilience of local meaning, even as the world’s places interact with, and are transformed by, the flow of people, ideas, and goods across the globe. Each chapter triangulates among texts depicting specific sub- regions of California, each in a different era. Chapter 1 analyzes adaptations to local conditions in the diggings of the Feather River watershed based on miners’ accounts. Chapter 2 examines the industrialization of the rural landscape in literature at the beginning of the twentieth century. Chapter 3 is a study of fictional family histories from settler colonial and indigenous perspectives. Chapter 4 is an interrogation of futurity in what I call “speculative regionalism,” or place-based science fiction. This study indicates that ground-level meaning-making is crucial to modern environmental practice. !ii Dedication The real work. For Hawk and Jennifer. For Margery J. Lombardi. !iii Acknowledgements I wish to thank those whose support, feedback, and friendship have aided and influenced this project: Sarah Nolan, whose scholarship and acumen set the standard for my graduate cohort; Jessica Fanaselle, walking partner, neighbor, radical force; Kyle Bladow, first contact and fellow traveller; and Tom Hertweck, guide to the labyrinth. I extend my sincere gratitude to Eric Morel, whose commitment to narrative and regionalism convinced me that postlocality and story are inextricable. My thanks to Sylvan Goldberg, true co-conspirator. He has consistently and conscientiously critiqued and challenged my ideas, across innumerable conversations and on the page. Sylvan’s arguments clarified my need to include an analysis of time in readings of locality. My thanks go to Wayne Cartwright for his friendship on and off the trout stream, his spectator’s interest in this project, and for providing me with the office space where the earliest stages of this project coalesced; and, of course, for being a worthy opponent on the cribbage board. Thanks also go to Jacob Harmon, southern gothic and humorist, a formidable cribbage player, a great talker, lover of music, and fly-fisherman. Jacob’s friendship made it possible for me to see this project clearly at key moments in its development. My loving thanks to Nancy Lombardi for her continued support of my intellectual endeavors and for her model of persistence. I want to acknowledge the expedient, crucial assistance of my committee members: my thanks to Elizabeth Raymond and Paul Starrs, for their enthusiasm for my work, often across great distances; Katherine Fusco, who has provided timely, valuable !iv mentoring; Michael P. Branch, for his humor and diligent attention to detail; and Cheryll Glotfelty, the calm, reassuring center of it all. To them I extend my deepest gratitude for shepherding this project. Finally, fellowships awarded by the Bilinski Educational Foundation and the James Q. and Cleo K. Ronald Memorial provided me with the year- long freedom to give this project my undivided attention, for which I am absolutely grateful. Last, but not least, I want to thank my colleagues, friends, and mentors in the Western Literature Association and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, whose work inspires, guides, and sustains me. !v Postlocal Ecocriticism: Place-Making in California’s Literary Landscape Table of Contents Preface: Postlocal Now!………………………………………………………………. vii General Introduction: Postlocal Expressions……………….………………………… 1 Prelude: Scene from Above; Postlocal Ecocriticism; Narrating Postlocal Space and Place; From Below: Postlocal Expression; Encounters with Literary Place- Making: Postlocal California and Literature of the U.S. West; Scope of the Present Work Chapter 1: “A dangerously speculative character”: Orientation, Temporary Residency, and Place-Making in the Mines…………………………………. 52 Isolation, Improvisation, Speculation; Temporary Residency; New Stories; Improvisations: Dame Shirley and the Commonplace; Speculation: Delano and the Custom of the Country; Isolation: Windeler, Elsewhere, Here; Conclusion: Postlocal Entanglements Chapter 2: In “jarring proximity”: The Problem of Simultaneity in The Valley of the Moon, The Ford, and Oil!……………………………………………… 106 Regionalism, Naturalism, Simultaneity, Anxiety; Simultaneity and Scale; The Valley of the Moon: “a regular movin’ picture except for the talkin’”; The Ford: “the pressure from without”; Oil!: “the same in California as everywhere else”; Conclusion: “dangerously squandered and essential to recover” Chapter 3: “Whoever claims it hardest”: Disorientation, Sovereignty, and Settler Colonialism in Shasta Bioregion…………………………………………….. 163 Shasta Bioregion / Coming Into the Country; Family, Story, History; Disorient; Hubris, Heartache; Didion: Deterritorialization and Nostalgia; Sanchez: Disorientation and Recurrence; Watching; Sarris: “all our histories dislocated together”; Conclusion: “multicultural and multi species tolerance” Chapter 4:“Alternate temporal regimes”: Speculative Regionalism, Postlocal Temporality, and Future California………………………………………… 230 Postlocal Time: The Return to Immanent Times; On Speculative Regionalism: Future Primitive / Archaeologies of the Future; Temporal Language: Time, Place, and Movement; Ecotopia: “a little vague about time”; Future; Primitive; The Wild Shore: “We were eating up the world”; Parable of the Sower: !vi “waiting for the old days to come back”; Gun, Watch, Calendar; “Let’s pass your watch and my gun around”; Conclusion: “something purposeful and constructive” Notes………………………………………………………………………………….. 293 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………….. 322 !vii Preface: Postlocal Now! This project is a study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century place-making in California literature. It reviews the spaces and times of globalism as people, ideas, and things pass through, accumulate, and commingle in regional and local places. I analyze how places and things transform and are transformed, expectedly and unexpectedly, and how these transformations might lead to responsible ecosocial practice. “Ecosocial” is a neologism coined by bioregionalist Stephanie Mills. Her term denotes her recognition of the entanglement of ecological and social practice. After her usage, I mean “ecosocial” to be read as an active and deliberate indication of socio-environmental responsibility toward the world’s places. The present work responds to and enlarges upon existing approaches to the development of a global environmental imagination. Within ecocriticism, the recognition that worldwide environmental crisis requires a greater understanding of the world’s interdependencies has caused scholars to reconsider their most basic premises about the role of place in a global age. Leading ecocritics suggest we should re-situate our environmental consciousness from local to global in order to better reflect the scale of contemporary environmental crises. They argue for a traveling, or “routed” environmental ethic rather than a “rooted” one. Yet I assert that arguments contingent on scale misjudge the temporal and geographical limits of human ethics and empathy. Distance in time and space present abstract challenges that are nearly insurmountable for the environmental imagination, as some ecocritics, their allies, and scholars from other !viii disciplines have shown. Instead, I suggest an emphasis on simultaneity, in which the world’s interconnections are examined as they circulate, accumulate, and manifest in layers in-place. That is, instead of attempting to apprehend the increasingly complex connectivities of globality in the abstract realm of “globalization” across vast distances, this project recommends coming to terms with the simultaneous experience
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