Copyright by Jennifer Ann Shapland 2016 The Dissertation Committee for Jennifer Ann Shapland Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: NARRATIVE SALVAGE Committee: Heather Houser, Supervisor Ann Cvetkovich, Co-Supervisor Elizabeth Cullingford Chad Bennett Randy Lewis NARRATIVE SALVAGE by Jennifer Ann Shapland, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2016 FOR LAURA AND JENNY ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you, foremost, Heather Houser: for guiding and inspiring my work since your arrival at UT, both in person and in the pages of Ecosickness. You asked the hardest questions, and for that I am immensely grateful. Thank you, Ann Cvetkovich, for your attention and openness to formal experimentation, in this dissertation and beyond. Thank you, Liz Cullingford, for showing me the connections between feminist politics and environmental concern in your Only Child course, and for supporting my nonfiction alongside my scholarship. Thank you, Chad Bennett, for making me rethink "narrative" and for modeling the life of a critic and creative practitioner. Thank you, Randy Lewis, for emphasizing the creative potential of both documentary and criticism in your course years ago, and thank you for joining this committee. Thank you, Patricia Schuab, for logistical heroism. Thank you, Jenny Howell and Laura Wallace. You read every word. Thank you, Jesi Egan, Emily Lederman, and Rebecca Macmillan for seeing me through to the finish. For support in all forms, thank you, Rhiannon "Marge" Goad, Elana Bizer, Ansley Brown, Clarissa Colley, Callie Collins, Josh Conrad, Iva Drtina-Hall, Andi Gustavson, Chris Kaiser, Martin Kevorkian, Katie Loughmiller, Liz Lovero, Laurie Macphee, Elizabeth McCracken, Jill Meyers, Jordan Mitchell, Maggie Nelson, Adeena Reitberger, Mary Renée, Steven Ross, Virginia Smith, Laura Wellen, Mom, Dad, Jeff, and Grandma. And thank you, Chelsea Weathers, for sitting with me as I write this. v ABSTRACT NARRATIVE SALVAGE by Jennifer Ann Shapland, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2016 Co-Supervisors Heather Houser and Ann Cvetkovich Narrative Salvage brings together contemporary writing and film of what I call wastescapes: places made expendable—wasted—under late capitalism. In hybrid works of the 2000s by Bonnie Jo Campbell, Agnes Varda, Natasha Trethewey, Brenda Longfellow, Rebecca Solnit, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Eileen Myles, I analyze tactile and emotional representations of everyday life in the wastescape. Each of the four chapters examines a particular wastescape featured by these writers and filmmakers: the postindustrial junkyard, the oil-slicked Gulf Coast, the nuclear waste strewn Nevada desert, and the melting Arctic tundra. Within these spaces, I track practices of repurposing that occur in the inhabitants’ everyday lives and analyze the potential for writing and film to reclaim and transform place through representation. I argue that waste is a crucial site of trans-corporeal experience, which in Stacy Alaimo's words constitutes a "literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature." The trans-corporeal wastescape affects ecosystems, human communities, and material objects; however, the representation of waste has not been a primary focus in environmental criticism. Narrative Salvage addresses this gap by approaching waste interdisciplinarily, drawing on the critical tools of environmental studies, sociology, and material culture studies. Practices of repurposing in the works I study dismantle the ideologies that create wastescapes by calling into question the production of value and rejection of waste that undergird capitalist and patriarchal enterprise. In the deviant ethics of the wastescape, the telos of progress loses its hold, making way for makeshift epistemologies and queer temporalities of continuous making do and regeneration. These experimental contemporary works' alinear, fragmented, and polyvocal forms embrace the vital ongoingness of decay and contamination. In Narrative Salvage, adamantly personal literatures and films of the wastescape urge audiences to rethink waste by seeing it anew, by defamiliarizing it, and in so doing help to rethink the human's relationship to—immersion within—place and environment. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures viii Introduction 1 Chapter One / Reuse and Refuse in the Postindustrial Junkyard 25 Chapter Two / 'Recovery' as Revision on the Mississippi Gulf Coast 51 Chapter Three / Dust, Digging, and Dispersal in the Great Basin 91 Chapter Four / The Importance of Being Inbetween: Imagined Arctics 126 Coda / Queerness, Waste, and Value 159 Bibliography 163 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Jennifer Lawrence starring in The Hunger Games, 2012 Figure 2 Jennifer Lawrence starring in Winter's Bone, 2010 Figure 3. Still from The Gleaners and I, in front of Des Glaneuses, Jean-François Millet, 1857 Figure 4 Richard Misrach Dead Animals #001, 1987 viii INTRODUCTION The ethical space of trans-corporeality is never an elsewhere but is always already here, in whatever compromised, ever-catalyzing form. A nearly unrecognizable sort of ethics emerges—one that demands that we inquire about all of the substances that surround us, those for which we may be somewhat responsible, those that may harm us, those that may harm others, and those that we suspect we do not know enough about. A trans-corporeal ethics calls us to somehow find ways of navigating through the simultaneously material, economic, and cultural systems that are so harmful to the living world and yet so difficult to contest or transform. Stacy Alaimo The vernacular is the place where everything meets. Eileen Myles The Dystopian Present In the years since I started my dissertation, the most visible genre in contemporary writing and film is the post-apocalyptic: speculative fictions and futuristic fantasies dominate the scene. This planet is so over, such work implies. Bring on the zombie apocalypse! Let's take, from among the myriad examples in literature and popular media, the Hunger Games franchise. Based on the best-selling YA book series by Suzanne Collins and grossing over $2.9 billion dollars worldwide since the first film's record-setting opening day in 2012, the films portray a reconfigured North America in the aftermath of an unnamed apocalyptic event. Residents of each of Panem's thirteen districts live in varying states of poverty, producing things like lumber, electricity, nuclear power, and 1 weapons for the wealthy Capitol. The films feature bleak landscapes and harsh living conditions in which communities struggle to get by. Each of the districts represents a different kind of very real, current North American poverty. For example, the protagonist, Katniss, played by Jennifer Lawrence, lives in coal mining district 12, formerly Appalachia, where she hunts illegally to feed her starving family. But of course this is dystopia and it takes place hundreds of years in the future. The world has already been destroyed, and this is its aftermath. Fantasies of world ending, like real fears of planetary destruction, make a dangerous error. They presume that there is an endpoint—to unchecked human population growth, to capitalist enterprise, to environmental degradation—and that humans, or some version of life, will live on in a remade or entirely new world beyond that endpoint. The logic of fantastic futurity is faulty, because it wants both an end and a clean slate. Narrative Salvage insists that we get neither. Instead, we get debris, wreckage, ruins. Toxic waterways, toxic bodies. Not in some distant or possible future, but now. If we attend closely to how our bodies are enmeshed with our surroundings, we can recognize this. Are we always already post-apocalyptic? Maybe. But what does it mean to feel that way? In order to "find ways of navigating" the entangled "material, economic, and cultural systems" of the trans-corporeal world Stacy Alaimo describes in my epigraph, we need access to entanglements we can feel, physically and emotionally. More than alarm and apocalyptic visions, this moment calls for immersion. 2 "Apocaholism"1 may be strangely comforting, for some, in times of pervasive crisis, but for others it is not adequately unsettling. For literary critic Ursula Heise, contemporary post-apocalyptic and dystopian fictions have themselves gotten too cozy and apolitical. Indeed, there's a strangely warm sense of home and family in The Hunger Games that comes from making do with abject poverty and starvation: subsistence hunting gets a decidedly sylvan feel, while home brewed medicine takes on the allure of all-natural cures. Heise writes What really counts is that the characters, in their break from the corruptions of the past, no longer have to deal with things like crowded cities, cumbersome democracies, and complex technologies. Whatever the hardships of their lives may be, they are better off without the world of corporations, biotech, and the Internet—even, apparently, at the price of genocide. Phenomena like the Hunger Games franchise prove just how appealing apocalypse and dystopia can be: how we long for it all to be over. I find this appeal deeply disturbing when compared with media depicting present-day scenarios of poverty and destruction— actual wastescapes. Consider the box office earnings discrepancy between the Hunger Games' billions and Jennifer Lawrence's earlier, strikingly similar role as Ree in Winter's Bone (2010), wherein she also hunts to feed her family and must strike out on her own to save her home, but this time it is in the context of the meth-soaked Ozarks of a very recognizable present. Debra Granik's adaptation of Daniel Woodrell's novel is immersed in its setting and immediate context, shot on location in Taney and Christian counties in Missouri. The homes, outbuildings, and public school that appear in the film are actual 1 A term Heise borrows from biologist Peter Kareiva. 3 properties in use by members of the local community, many of whom appear in the film.