Coming and Going to Know a Place: Transience in Literature of the US West

Abstract

"Coming and Going to Know a Place: Transience in Literature of the US West" looks at mobile and temporary relationships with place in western literature, arguing that transience invites under-explored forms of ecological attention. Historical and environmental conditions alike have long fostered itinerancy in the US West, a tendency which has been critiqued on the grounds that it leads to resource extraction, displacement, escapism, or simply a lack of deep place knowledge. However, putting down roots is not the only way to develop an ecological sensibility. "Coming and Going to Know a Place" examines literary representations of impermanent modes of existence in order to advocate for a serious ecocritical consideration of that which does not last. Given our current climate crisis and uncertain environmental future, I argue that it is necessary to put pressure on environmentalist thinking that is overly dependent on visions of progress, which I see as troublingly linked to the futural logics of settler colonialism and capitalism. I contend that transient encounters have the ability to reorient one’s attention away from forward-looking progress narratives and towards the environment of the here and now.

Combining close reading, historicist, and ecocritical methods, I situate my primary texts within their historical contexts while also contemplating their resonances with contemporary environmental concerns, particularly where they broaden our understanding of environmental injustices past and present. Additionally, my work draws on scholarship in the fields of western literature, modernism, and Native American Studies. I conceive my primary texts as existing within the material and theoretical space Neil Campbell describes as a “rhizomatic West,” a nonlinear, non-hierarchical proliferation of interconnectedness that challenges settler colonial narratives of the region. I begin by grappling with the complex legacies of John Muir and wilderness preservation, then turn to Mary Hunter Austin to set up a driving question for the rest of the project: what does an environmentalist impulse without the expectation of permanence look like? While Muir and Austin are known as environmental writers, in subsequent chapters I apply an ecocritical lens to my primary texts to make the case for their relevance to ecocritical study. In Chapter Two I assert that D’Arcy McNickle’s "The Surrounded" is an early example of environmental justice literature, due to its harsh critique of the ways early-twentieth-century western land policies affected Indigenous Americans. My final two chapters both consider the role of public lands in the US West and explore possibilities for refocusing one’s attention towards the present within those spaces, first by reading Willa Cather’s "The Professor’s House" with an eye to its latent environmental commitments and then by putting Jack Kerouac’s "The Dharma Bums" in conversation with contemporaneous rock climbers in Yosemite Valley. In all of my chapters, I contend that literary texts can foster critical practices of noticing that enable us to conceive of an environmentalism that is not limited by a fixation on the future, but rather can expand and meander in both space and time.