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Book Synopsis Environmental Justice Metafiction by :
Download or read book Environmental Justice Metafiction written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation argues that ethnic minority women authors are creating new models of metafiction--fiction which thematizes or theorizes storytelling--designed specifically to target environmental inequalities important in their communities and in a larger global context. Since environmental injustice has a disproportionate impact on women, low-income populations, and people of color, my project examines the intersection of literary narratives with social, economic, and historical narratives to understand how the exploitation of nature is linked to the exploitation of people. In particular, I examine recent novels by Native and Asian American authors, including Louise Erdrich's Four Souls (2004), Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995), Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats (1998), and Karen Yamashita's Tropic of Orange (1997) to show how a formal and thematic focus on storytelling allows these writers to scrutinize the role narratives play in perpetuating environmental injustice and to construct counter-narratives which encourage political self-consciousness and change. To account for the novels' metafictive political force, this project identifies four different models of metafiction, including "trickster" (Erdrich), "trauma" (Hogan), "documentary" (Ozeki), and "hypercontextual" (Yamashita), and then reveals how these models are used to negotiate specific environmental justice issues such as the exploitation of natural resources and hydroelectric damming on Native lands, factory farming, and urban degradation. Revising postmodern approaches to metafiction, I claim that these contemporary texts draw on alternative and ethnic storytelling/activist traditions not only to highlight the "constructedness" of narratives, but also the material effects of those constructions for people and environments. In so doing, this project critiques the mainstream environmental movement's tendency to ignore race, gender, class, and non-wilderness environments. Although environmental justice scholarship is expanding definitions of the environment to include toxic/built spaces, my project argues for the need to focus on the literary and cultural narratives about these landscapes in addition to gathering social and scientific data. Ultimately, I claim that metafiction, and the humanities more broadly, are especially suited to addressing environmental injustice because understanding this phenomenon requires us to reflect on the relationship between "how" we tell stories and "how" we act in the world
