Date of Award
Spring 2026
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
English Language and Literatures
First Advisor
Catherine Keyser
Abstract
This dissertation approaches the last one hundred years of American environmental literature from the unique perspective of a combined affective and material ecocritical methodology. I direct this project’s focus to the literature of the American South and the West, as they represent emblematic sites of the American environmental imagination. The South often appears sticky and densely material, a land full of ghosts and troubled racial and colonial histories. Concurrently, the West holds the shimmering promise of the frontier’s unbridled liberatory potential, and the sublimity of mountaintops resonates alongside the logical extent of capitalist accumulation. Approaching this project from a regional perspective uncovers the secret anxieties within the last century’s environmental writing—specifically fears about human finitude and mortality and what agential forces exist in landscapes. This project highlights imaginative literature that subverts hegemonic fantasies of human domination, focusing instead on elemental agencies and holistic ecologies that consider the affective vitality and activity of all matter. Along the way, I consult decolonial and ecofeminist theories to explore how women’s bodies are aligned with a productive abjection in the South, opportunities for corporeal enmeshment with a living Southern terra, and ultimately how the experience of natural disaster enables new conceptions of phenomenology. These threads of environmental intersubjectivity and posthuman becoming are further developed in the Western section of this project. I consider early twentieth-century conceptions of species and subjectivity to outline an expansive interspecies affectivity that expands to include landscapes. And I conclude with a study of posthuman ecological becoming that enfolds affect, matter, and spirituality in a fully realized network of de-hierarchical conceptions of human and nonhuman being. This project addresses the urgent need for a revised understanding of human subjectivity in our age of increasing ecological precarity, and promotes a more ethical view of what it means to be, in light of our recent catastrophic environmental histories and with an eye to better futures.
Rights
© 2026, Sarah Tanner
Recommended Citation
Tanner, S.(2026). Ecological Bodies: Affective and Material Entanglements in American Environmental Literature. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8908