1 Bealer Preliminary Pages PQ

GRAPHIC ENVIRONMENTS: PERFORMING ECOCRITICISM AT THE CONFLUENCE OF IMAGE AND TEXT by Adele Haverty Bealer A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English The University of Utah May 2014 Copyright © Adele Haverty Bealer 2014 All Rights Reserved The University of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The following faculty members served as the supervisory committee chair and members for the dissertation of Adele Haverty Bealer . Dates at right indicate the members’ approval of the dissertation. Robert S. Tatum , Chair March 7, 2014 Date Approved Howard Horwitz , Member March 7, 2014 Date Approved Stuart K. Culver , Member March 7, 2014 Date Approved Mary S. Strine , Member March 7, 2014 Date Approved Leonard C. Hawes , Member March 7, 2014 Date Approved The dissertation has also been approved by Barry Weller , Chair of the Department/School/College of English and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT My dissertation focuses on an ecocritical evaluation of environmental representation in contemporary comics and graphic novels. Ecocriticism and the graphic narrative share disciplinary similarities; both are hybrid forms that commingle seemingly incommensurable components (literature and the land, text and image), and both continue to evolve in complex and exciting ways. Using the familiar rubric of animal, vegetable, and mineral, my dissertation explores the theoretical underpinnings of ecocriticism’s contemporary moment as it is illustrated in the graphic environment. Ecocriticism today is marked by an increased interest in postcolonial theory and by a posthumanist turn that has culminated in various species of speculative realism and new materialist theory. Following an introduction designed to juxtapose the development of ecocriticism with the evolving graphic and narrative conventions of comics and graphic novels, I turn in my first chapter to a postcolonial ecocritical analysis of the graphic novel. Given the confluence of aesthetics and politics in a postcolonial theory, I invoke the work of French theorist Jacques Rancière as a necessary component of my ecocritical analysis of three graphic narratives featuring animal protagonists. My second chapter provides close textual and visual readings of two graphic novels whose vegetable-human hybrid characters provide models for applying Deleuze’s theory of the rhizome and Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory to environmental representation. This chapter introduces key concepts that ground much of new materialism and serves as a bridge to my third chapter. Here, I weave together the threads of feminist materialism and object-oriented ontology in an ecocritical reading of three graphic novels that consider things from a thing’s point of view. My conclusion shifts forward to an ecocritical reading of two graphic novels that provide global and local perspectives on the critical issues concerning environmental writers and theorists today, the ecological, social, and economic consequences of hyperobjects like global climate change and global financial collapse. Graphic narratives provide a uniquely effective representational medium for locating the contemporary environmental imagination and for illustrating the theoretical complexities beneath its surface. I argue that there is much work to be done at the confluence of image and text in the graphic environment. iv For my superheroes, Katie and Steve TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................. viii INTRODUCTION: GRAPHIC ENVIRONMENTS............................................ 1 Ecocriticism: An Evolving Discipline.................................................................. 6 The Graphic Novel: At the Confluence of Image and Text ................................. 13 GRAPHIC Novels: The Aesthetics of Cartoon Art.............................................. 22 Graphic NOVELS: Narrative as Aesthetic........................................................... 35 Chapters 1 ANIMAL: OVERLOOKING THE POST-OTHER ............................................ 49 Connecting Ecocriticism and Postcolonialism Through Jacques Rancière.......... 54 Welcome to the Postcolony: Unworking Animals in Wounded Animals............. 60 Can I Get a Witness? Fable and Figure in Pride of Baghdad .............................. 73 Telling Tales: Novel Voices and Impossible Identifications in WE3................... 89 2 VEGETABLE: EMERGING ENTANGLEMENTS............................................104 The Rhizome and the Assemblage .......................................................................106 Minor Literature and the Mossy Man-Brute: Saga of the Swamp Thing .............112 Flowers Have Their Own Agenda: Black Orchid ................................................127 3 MINERAL: DANCING LIKE A MOUNTAIN...................................................143 The New Materialisms .........................................................................................144 Those Mute Materials: Garfield Minus Garfield .................................................145 A World of Fleshy Beings: Trans-corporeality in Chew: Taster’s Choice..........167 Material Memoir and the Ecological Body: Paul Chadwick’s Concrete .............179 CONCLUSION: MAKING ECOCRITICISM MATTER...................................202 Performing Ecocriticism After the Narrative is Over: Chasing The Massive ......205 Something Darker: Practicing Dissensus in Dark Rain .......................................224 Coda: Looking Ahead, or I Need a Superhero .................................................237 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY .....................................................................................245 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A project like this represents the confluence of many creative and intellectual currents. I must express my deepest gratitude to Steve Tatum, whose mentorship has been extraordinarily valuable. His frank discussion and thoughtful critique have sustained me throughout my academic career, and I cannot adequately express my appreciation for the room to roam he has always afforded me. I would also like to thank the rest of my committee members for their guidance and support. Mary Strine first set me on the path to graphic narrative, and her fierce intellectual curiosity has been a beacon to me. Len Hawes has been my constant interlocutor and his influence is consciously reflected in my work. Howard Horwitz and Stuart Culver have indelibly marked my pedagogy. Several individuals provided invaluable suggestions about specific graphic texts to consider for this project. I am especially grateful to Katie Whitlock, Tracy Bealer, Tony Poulson, and Walter Biggins for their generous engagement with my obsession. And finally, I want to acknowledge the support of my personal assemblage, my two- and four-legged family and friends, absent and present, whose understanding and encouragement have helped me to achieve a cherished ambition. I am and continue to be deeply grateful for our messy and magnificent entanglement. INTRODUCTION: GRAPHIC ENVIRONMENTS Ecocriticism and the graphic novel share an overlapping (and little noted) coincidence of attributes and arguments. Both are what Bruno Latour designated as quasi-objects, hybrid combinations assembled in the middle ground between well- established polarities: nature and culture, image and text (We Have Never Been Modern 77). Broadly sketching the outlines of ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment,” Cheryll Glotfelty envisioned a chimerical blend of literary criticism and scientific theory, an interdisciplinary superhero with “one foot in literature and the other on land,” able to “negotiate between the human and the nonhuman” while exploring the nuances of their intersection as represented in literature (Glotfelty and Fromm xix). The graphic novel is likewise a shifting combination of authorial text and artistic image—“more alchemy than science” according to Scott McCloud—another kind of assemblage that relies on the tensions and affinities between its constituent arts to animate its content (161). Both are primarily concerned with representation; the graphic novel provides its creators with a medium for conceptual expression, while ecocriticism critically analyzes and evaluates the representational strategies of multiple media. In yet another display of similarity, the respective practitioners of each discipline appear to agree to disagree about preferred nomenclature. While yielding to the widespread and conventional use of the phrase ecocriticism by other ecocritics, Lawrence Buell argued that the description “environmental” criticism 2 “approximates better than ‘eco’ the hybridity of the subject at issue...as well as the movement’s increasingly heterogeneous foci” on a variety of environments represented within a far more interdisciplinary matrix (The Future of Environmental Criticism viii). Patrick D. Murphy also elaborates on the notion of disciplinary diversity, pointing out that there is an equal need to “distinguish between the terrain of ecological criticism...and the distinct terrain of the literature itself,” between Glotfelty’s ground rules and the multiplicity of texts and genres in

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