Wild Abandon
American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology

Examines how interactions between ecology and psychoanalysis shifted the focus of the American wilderness narrative from environment to identity.

Alexander Menrisky (Author)

9781108842563, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 December 2020

290 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.55 kg

The American wilderness narrative, which divides nature from culture, has remained remarkably persistent despite the rise of ecological science, which emphasizes interconnection between these spheres. Wild Abandon considers how ecology's interaction with radical politics of authenticity in the twentieth century has kept that narrative alive in altered form. As ecology gained political momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, many environmentalists combined it with ideas borrowed from psychoanalysis and a variety of identity-based social movements. The result was an identity politics of ecology that framed ecology itself as an authentic identity position repressed by cultural forms, including social differences and even selfhood. Through readings of texts by Edward Abbey, Simon Ortiz, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Jon Krakauer, among others, Alexander Menrisky argues that writers have both dramatized and critiqued this tendency, in the process undermining the concept of authenticity altogether and granting insight into alternative histories of identity and environment.

Acknowledgements
Introduction. Modern Environmentalism's Identity Politics
1. The Ecological Alternative: Civilization, Selfhood, and Environment in the 1960s
2. The Entheogenic Landscape: Psychedelic Primitives, Ecological Indians, and the American Counterculture
3. The Universal Wilderness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and an Identity Politics for the State of Nature
4. The Essential Ecosystem: Reproduction, Network, and Biological Reduction
5. The Death of the Supertramp: Psychoanalytic Narratives and American Wilderness
Notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Environmental economics [KCN], Ethnic studies [JFSL], Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS]