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For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications 1 Activism Ltd – Environmental Activism and Contemporary Literature Christopher James Maughan A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature University of Warwick, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies June 2015 2 Contents Activism Ltd – Environmental Activism and Contemporary Literature ......................................... 1 Contents 2 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................................. 4 Abstract 5 Introduction 7 1: ‘ONE AND INDIVISIBLE, A SEAMLESS WEB’ – Historicising Climate Change ................. 12 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 12 Marxism and Ecocriticism ..................................................................................................... 19 The ‘political unconscious’ ................................................................................................... 21 Ecocriticism and the ‘political unconscious’ ....................................................................... 25 1.1: Maggie Gee - The Flood (2004) ...................................................................................... 30 The Political Unconscious I: The Political Horizon ........................................................... 30 The Political Unconscious II: The Social Horizon ............................................................. 33 The Political Unconscious III: The Historical Horizon ...................................................... 37 Resolution and Conclusions ................................................................................................ 45 1.2: Ian McEwan - Solar (2010)............................................................................................... 49 The Political Unconscious I: The Political Horizon ........................................................... 53 The Political Unconscious II: The Social Horizon ............................................................. 57 The Political Unconscious III: The Historical Horizon ...................................................... 62 2: ACTIVISM LTD – Representations of Environmental Activism and Neoliberal Capture .... 73 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 73 Environmental activism in contemporary fiction and film................................................. 78 Environmental activism and the social sciences .............................................................. 84 2.1: Readings ............................................................................................................................. 98 2.1.1: T.C. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth (2000) ............................................................. 100 2.1.2: Jonathan Franzen - Freedom (2010) .................................................................... 131 3: HUNGER GAMES – Agroecology, Activism and the ‘Corporate Food Regime’ ................ 158 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 158 3.1: Corporatism and resistance in the new world (dis)order ........................................... 162 The agroecological movement .......................................................................................... 165 3.2: Michelle Cliff - No Telephone to Heaven (1987) ......................................................... 170 Restructuring and instability ............................................................................................... 172 3 ‘New spaces for practicing democracy’ ............................................................................ 180 Place ...................................................................................................................................... 186 3.3: Ruth Ozeki - All Over Creation (2003) .......................................................................... 195 Thesis-antithesis-synthesis, or, ‘reimagining community’ ............................................. 198 ‘Rhizomatic stories’? ........................................................................................................... 204 4: ACTIVIST REALISM – Environmental Activism and Literary Non-fiction............................ 219 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 219 The politics of literary non-fiction ....................................................................................... 221 Literary non-fiction and environmental crisis ................................................................... 228 4.1 Chris Hedges & Joe Sacco - Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012) .............. 236 Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 236 The re-imagining of ‘slow violence’ ................................................................................... 239 Community and resistance ................................................................................................. 248 ‘... and the environmentalism of the poor’ ........................................................................ 254 The activist aesthetic........................................................................................................... 261 4.2 Bill McKibben - Oil and Honey (2013) ........................................................................... 267 Literary status ....................................................................................................................... 268 Narrative ................................................................................................................................ 271 Genre ..................................................................................................................................... 274 Aesthetics I – SF .................................................................................................................. 280 Aesthetics II – ‘becoming’ ................................................................................................... 283 Conclusions .............................................................................................................................. 289 Works Cited 291 4 Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without a great deal of love and support. Firstly, my supervisor, Graeme Macdonald, who has, with remarkable patience and encouragement, read and re-read so many of my faltering words, even during periods of severe illness. Many fellow students, too, across the past four years, have enriched my personal and intellectual life with conversation, support and courageous action. Of particular note, are Vishal Chauhan, Hanna Wheatley, Stephen Barrell, Alix Villanueva, Connor Schwartz, Dexter Bushell, Robert King, and especially Rhys Williams. And to my partner, Alice, whose energy, love and tenderness has seen me through so many periods of uncertainty and doubt. Above all, I thank my parents, without whom I would not have got here at all, especially my Dad, who has tirelessly supported me every step of the way with advice, love, and cricket updates. 5 Abstract This thesis examines representations of environmental activism in contemporary literature. In general terms, this thesis understands activism to be a mode of politics that seeks to transform society, counter to forces of oppression and crisis. Precisely as a transformative or counter-hegemonic mode of politics, the actions, public perceptions, and representations (literary or otherwise) of activism and social movements mark out an extreme – though rarely understood – horizon of political agency and possibility. The thesis uses and adapts Fredric Jameson’s theory of the political unconscious to explore, via literary representation, the prospects, constraints, and capacities which exist in contemporary forms of environmental activism. It begins by considering novelistic representations of climate change that display a tension between ‘fast-violent’ and gradual or historically-embedded forms of environmental change. The thesis then moves on to consider novelistic fiction that displays evidence of the intertwining of environmental crises and neoliberal governmentalities. A later chapter turns to a more specific site of resistance – food production – examining novelistic fiction that not only thematises the emergence of particular forms of resistance, but also aesthetically and formally registers agroecological theory and practice. The final chapter moves away from fictive writing and investigates the ways in which literary non-fiction presents a new kind