MAPPING THE MORIBUND: THE RHETORIC OF MAPPING DEATH By ROLF K. ANDERSON A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2018 © 2018 Rolf K. Anderson To Hazel ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I first want to thank the EcoTourists—Shannon Butts, Jason Crider, Jacob Greene, and Madison Jones—my close friends, collaborators, and role-models. Jason in particular deserves more than thanks for his patient guidance over the last two years. I also want to thank mentors new and old. Terry Harpold rekindled a part of my imagination I’d forgotten. Phil Wegner brought warmth to every encounter. Sid Dobrin lit fires. Before them, Barry Mauer set the example for how education and critical thinking are supposed to work. And of course, without Greg Ulmer, none of this would be possible. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................6 INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................7 FOUR CORNERS .........................................................................................................................10 Origins ....................................................................................................................................10 Emplaced Ecocomposition .....................................................................................................12 Mythos: Maps and Legends ....................................................................................................17 Make a Map ............................................................................................................................21 DISNEY DEATH TOUR ..............................................................................................................26 The Disney Death Myth ..........................................................................................................26 Criticizing the Mouse .............................................................................................................31 From Dark Tourism to Thanatourism .....................................................................................33 Chōra: Bodies, Minds, and (Disney) World ...........................................................................36 Death Rhetoric ........................................................................................................................39 Thinking without Knowing .....................................................................................................43 CONCLUSION ..............................................................................................................................46 REFERENCES ..............................................................................................................................48 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .........................................................................................................51 5 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts MAPPING THE MORIBUND: THE RHETORIC OF MAPPING DEATH By Rolf K. Anderson August 2018 Chair: Terry Harpold Major: English This thesis functions as a place-based mystory, a digital writing pedagogy developed by Gregory L. Ulmer. As an intervention in the fields of rhetoric and writing studies in general and ecocomposition in particular, I consider the role of specific places not only to develop theories of spatial writing, but to produce writings in accordance with those theories. My project consists of a formal written document and an online mapping installation. Beginning with the Four Corners Monument at the borders of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, I examine a single place through various scalar lenses in relation to global climate disruption. My digital map of Four Corners challenges the conventions of representing place at smoothly transitioning scales. From the desert southwest, my project shifts to Central Florida, using theme park tragedies at Walt Disney World as a means of conceptualizing death rhetorically and in relation to spatial writing. 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Make a map… —Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Mapping mystory: This project functions as a place-based mystory, a digital writing pedagogy developed by Gregory L. Ulmer. Ulmer posits the mystory genre as a means identifying and expressing cultural forces determining individual identity, the assumption being that the same forces responsible for individual dilemmas also generate collective aporia. To create a mystory, “Students map or document their situations or relationship to each of four institutions: Career field or major; Family; Entertainment; community History (as taught in school or otherwise commemorated in the community)” (Ulmer, 2003, p. 6). In Ulmer’s method these four institutional discourses constitute the four corners of the popcycle, which operates according to a logic of assemblage. Working through the four corners of the popcycle to assemble a mystory enables one to find his or her compass; the overall goal is to provide a sense of orientation. “Mapping the Moribund” navigates the popcycle in search of disciplinary insight. In my case, those disciplines include rhetoric and writing studies in general and ecocomposition in particular. Spatial considerations proliferate in these fields, with recent work turning toward the role of specific places in the act and theorizing of writing. This project therefore emphasizes two places: the Four Corners Monument in the American Southwest, corresponding in my case to the popcycle’s Career discourse, and Walt Disney World in Central Florida, which, given my personal history as a Central Florida resident and a subject of The Walt Disney Company’s expansive cultural reach, corresponds to the discourses of Family, Community, and Entertainment. 7 I present the written portion of this project as a trace of conceptual and practical progress from one place to another. Four Corners brings into focus some of the spatial and ecological principles on which this project is premised; like the point on a two-dimensional graph joining X and Y axes, these intersecting borders mark the origin. Moreover, Four Corners marks a site emblematic of changing climate, the global prospect of which now overdetermines every act of environmental writing. As recent geologic evidence reveals, the site hosts the highest concentration of atmospheric methane in the continental United States (Kort et al., 2014). I then move from the wildness of the West to Central Florida. My collaboration with Jason Crider on our augmented reality project, “Disney Death Tour,” maps 40 years of fatalities at Disney theme parks. Such high-profile reminders of death in a location thoroughly designed to obscure it invoke Diane Davis’s (2010) “Rhetoric of Responsibility,” an insistence upon more thoughtful community engagement when death re-enters daily considerations. At Walt Disney World, I develop a rhetorical theory of death in shared public spaces. By combining these two locations, this project responds to crises through rhetorical invention. Juxtaposed, Four Corners and Walt Disney World risk the staging of a clichéd and ineffective nature/culture binary that I want to avoid. Instead, scale describes the complex operations that occur at individual, local, and global levels, independent from one another as perceptual frameworks, yet inherently ecological. “Mapping the Moribund” seeks to write catastrophe at the community level, as in the case of those who die at Disney, and gesture toward a practice of writing impossibly complex ecological crisis at another scale. As ecocompositionists, we might heed the words of Greg Garrard (2011), who shares the language of Diane Davis to outline a “poetics of responsibility:” “The fundamental problem of 8 responsibility is not what we humans are, nor how we can ‘be’ better, more natural, primal or authentic, but what we do” (p. 79). Rhetoric includes choices, and choice entails action. Inasmuch as making is an extension of doing, this thesis and its accompanying digital maps are my response to an undeniable call to action. As my entry into the ecocompositional conversation, my message is clear: if responsible action toward our environments—a need heightened to extremity by the specter of climate change—requires communal life to hold itself “at a level equal to death” (Davis, 2010, p. 11), then what’s needed are not better representations of death, but more prominent reminders of the foundational role of death in our rhetorics of place. 9 CHAPTER 2 FOUR CORNERS With climate change, however, we have a map whose scale includes the whole earth but, when it comes to relating the threat to daily questions of politics, ethics, or specific interpretations of history, culture, literature or other areas, the map is often almost mockingly useless. —Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge Origins At 36° 59′ 56.31″ N latitude, 109° 2′ 42.62″ W longitude, a circular bronze plaque embedded in a slab of granite joins the unusually rectilinear borders of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah at four perfect