Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

12. The subgenre of environmental health memoirs experienced a boom beginning in the 1990s. Titles include Susanne Antonetta, Body Toxic (2001); McKay Jenkins, What’s Gotten Into Us? (2011); Sandra Steingraber, Living Downstream (1997); and Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge (1991). In Bodily Natures Alaimo adeptly analyzes how this corpus of texts brings readers to awareness of the material relatedness between bodies and environments. I reference her arguments throughout this book.

13. Dimock and Wald, “Preface. Literature and Science,” 705.

14. Slovic and Slovic, “Numbers and Nerves,” 14, 15.

15. For environmental histories of the twentieth century, see Guha, Environmentalism; McNeill, Something New Under the Sun; Merchant, American Environmental History; and Montrie, A People’s History of Environmentalism in the United States.

16. For a critique of the ethos of “one earth,” see Jasanoff, “Heaven and Earth,” 31–54. Dipesh Chakrabarty has theorized this planetary consciousness in terms of the Anthropocene, an epoch popularized by Paul Crutzen in which human actions alter not only immediate environments but also geophysical processes. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History.”

17. As Priscilla Wald relates, “the production of recombinant DNA first occurred in a Stanford laboratory in the early 1970s. Stanford applied for a patent on recombinant DNA in the mid-1970s, and it was awarded in 1980, the same year the US Supreme Court confirmed the legality of the first patent on a living organism, a bacterium engineered to break down oil.” Wald, “American Studies and the Politics of Life,” 200. For more on this history, see Keller, Refiguring Life; Kevles, “Out of Genetics,” 3–36; and Thacker, Global Genome.

18. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 17–18.

19. Clarke et al., Biomedicalization, 47. Part 1 of this edited collection more fully elaborates the shifts to medicalization and biomedicalization. Ivan Illich coined the term medicalization in the mid-1970s to disparage the incursion of medicine into all aspects of life—birth, aging, mental distress, discomfort, and death—such that people are unable to manage injury and vulnerability as autonomous individuals. Illich, Medical Nemesis, 33.

20. Clarke et al., Biomedicalization, 50.

21. Some notes on terminology. My use of the term biotechnology is broader than Clarke et al.’s definition: innovations where “basic protein structures are altered affecting genetic structure(s) (e.g., recombinant DNA).” Ibid., 43n19. As I use it in this book, biotechnology encompasses these inventions as well as those such as pharmaceuticals and diagnostic devices that may—but do not necessarily—use biological agents as the raw components. My use of technoscience is more capacious. It captures these technologies and others, such as topical chemical fertilizers, that are not designed to change the matter of life but often do so indirectly. This term also emphasizes that technological development and basic scientific research increasingly go hand in glove after the 1970s. There is a vast literature on the growth of biotechnology, especially as it serves capitalist and state ends. See Cooper, Life as Surplus; Rajan, Biocapital; Rose and Rose, Genes, Cells, and Brains; Smith and Morra, The Prosthetic Impulse; and Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue Economies.

22. Clarke et al., Biomedicalization, 52.

23. The authors of Biomedicalization and the other medical sociologists cited here tend to take people in the West as their index cases. It’s important to note that, for better and for worse, biomedicine and biotechnology are not equally available to all populations. Chapters 2 and 5 address the differential effects of technology on the poor, women, homosexuals, and the racially and ethnically marginalized.

24. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 18.

25. See Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet.

26. Kleinman, The Illness Narratives, 3.

27. Epstein, Altered Conditions, 8.

28. I develop this distinction from Mitman, Breathing Space, 252.

29. Kleinman, The Illness Narratives, 6.

30. See Furberg et al., “Fish Consumption and Plasma Levels.”

31. I adapt Ulrich Beck’s concept of “risk fate” to the conditions of pervasive sickness. For Beck, a risk fate is a condition “into which one is born, which one cannot escape with any amount of achievement, with the ‘small difference’ (that is the one with the big effect) that we are all confronted similarly by that fate.” Beck, Risk Society, 41. Whether that fate is one of extreme immiseration or of mild distress depends on a variety of socioeconomic, gender, ethnic/racial, and geographic factors that Beck does not adequately acknowledge in this book.

32. Nixon, Slow Violence, 14.

33. Serres, The Natural Contract, 33.

34. The literature on ideas of nature is vast, but seminal primers include Cronon, “Introduction” and “The Trouble with Wilderness”; Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore; Soper, What Is Nature?; and Williams, “Ideas of Nature.”

35. Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters,” 298.

36. Rabinow, “Artificiality and Enlightenment,” 245.

37. Latour, “‘It’s the Development, Stupid!’”

38. Scott Slovic has usefully defined nature writing as “literary nonfiction that offers scientific scrutiny of the world, … explores the private experience of the individual human observer of the world, or reflects upon the political and philosophical implications of the relationships among human beings and the larger planet.” Slovic, “Nature Writing,” 888.

39. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 82.

40. Marx, The Machine in the Garden.

41. Beck describes reflexive modernization, or its boomerang effect, as occurring when “the agents of modernization themselves are emphatically caught in the maelstrom of hazards that they unleash and profit from.” Beck, Risk Society, 37.

42. Lawrence Buell coins “environmentality” to refer to a person’s or group’s way of “thinking environmental belonging and citizenship.” Buell, “Ecoglobalist Affects,” 227.

43. I return to this point in the book’s conclusion.

44. Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 8.

45. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 165.

46. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? xxv.

47. This strain of posthumanism differs from the techno-utopian variety, which envisions transcending materiality through enhanced integration with computers and other informatic machines.

48. See Alaimo, Bodily Natures; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; and Bennett, Vibrant Matter. See also Wolfe’s elaboration of posthumanism as “constitutive dependency and finitude” that deprivileges human consciousness and reason. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? xxvi. I do not provide a thorough overview of posthumanism and new materialism here. On the various approaches to the former, see Wolfe; and, to the latter, see Coole and Frost, New Materialisms.

49. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 9.

50. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2.

51. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 101–2.

52. Yale University’s Forum on Climate Change and Media, with its mission to “analyze and discuss the process by which climate change is communicated through traditional and new media,” is one venture that instances this trend. Ward, “NOAA’s 2012 Arctic ‘Report Card.’”

53. Squier, Liminal Lives, 14.

54. Wald, Contagious, 3.

56. Langston analyzes “the landscape of exposure” to diethylstilbestrol (DES) in postwar America, the hormone disruptor’s effects on women’s health, and the contests over regulation. Langston, Toxic Bodies, xiii. Mitman argues that specific U.S. towns and regions develop in response to allergies and asthma, just as these syndromes themselves result from our meddling in ecosystems. Mitman, Breathing Space. Nash shares Langston’s and Mitman’s focus on the “ecological body,” that is, the body “characterized by a constant exchange between inside and outside, by fluxes and flows, and by its close dependence on the surrounding environment.” Nash, Inescapable Ecologies, 12. She researches a population of Mexican migrant farmworkers affected by pesticide use in California’s Central Valley.

57. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 31.

58. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 158.

60. Nixon, Slow Violence, 47. Nixon defines slow violence as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Ibid., 2.

61. Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet counsels that we need “an increased emphasis on a sense of planet, a cognitive understanding and affective attachment to the global.” Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 59. Though the book solicits farther-reaching feeling and states that risk is affectively generative, it does not elaborate the various links between narrative, affect, and environmental consciousness. The same observation applies to Buell’s essay on “ecoglobalist affects.” Its title proclaims an interest in the emotions of global environmentality, but the piece does not differentiate and theorize those affects that constitute what he calls ecoglobalism. Buell, “Ecoglobalist Affects.”

Ecocritics Simon C. Estok and Jennifer K. Ladino have focused on specific affects that underpin anthropogenic environmental damage and progressive environmentalism, respectively. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness” and Ladino, Reclaiming Nostalgia. Estok’s arguments have been the more contentious of the two. He urges the field to privilege “ecophobia,” that is, “irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world, as present and subtle in our daily lives and literature as homophobia and racism and sexism.” Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness,” 208. While Estok’s choice of affect holds a certain logical appeal—that we hate what we fear and therefore destroy it—his affective range is too limited and his theorization of phobia too simplistic. Other literary scholars have elaborated on these complaints. See Taylor, “The Nature of Fear”; and Thornber, Ecoambiguity, 9–10.

62. Seminal studies of the pastoral include Alpers, What Is Pastoral?; Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral; Marx, The Machine in the Garden; and Williams, The Country and the City.

63. Nancy Easterlin represents another approach to emotion within ecocriticism and is implicitly in dialogue with Wilson. She examines evolutionary psychological theories to elucidate bonds to place and the environmental aesthetics they promote. Easterlin, “‘Loving Ourselves Best of All.’” Another important body of work for environmental affect scholarship is environmental rhetoric. See Harré, Brockmeier, and Mülhaüser, Greenspeak; and Herndl and Brown, Green Culture.

64. The phrase is Buell’s, “Ecoglobalist Affects,” 235.

65. In this chapter and throughout this book, I alternate between affect, emotion, and feeling. Within cultural studies there are no fixed protocols for choosing between these terms. Like many scholars, I do not insist on the distinction. I prefer instead to move between the categories in order to capture the somatic, cognitive, and social dimensions of feelings as well as how they form under historical, cultural, and political pressures. For those interested in debates over the concepts, Brian Massumi provides an influential account of the difference between emotion and affect in Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28–32. Amélie Rorty thinks historically about the move “from passions to emotions and sentiments.” Rorty, “From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments.” Altieri differentiates affects, feelings, moods, emotions, and passions in Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 2. Damasio distinguishes emotion from feeling from a neuroscientific standpoint in Damasio, Descartes’ Error. Finally, Ngai explains the psychoanalytic bases for distinguishing affect and emotion in Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 25–26.

66. Cvetkovich, Depression, 4.

67. Lauren Berlant’s project on “cruel optimism” draws out attachment and detachment as the key terms of affect study since the late 1990s. Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

68. I borrow this verb from David Palumbo-Liu, who examines the twenty-first-century “‘delivery systems’” by which others’ affects enter our sphere of concern. Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverance of Others, 180.

69. See Clough, “Introduction”; Gregg and Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers”; and Leys, “The Turn to Affect.” Gregg and Seigworth usefully differentiate eight, sometimes intersecting, strands of affect study. Gregg and Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 6–8.

70. Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 194.

73. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 20. See also Brennan, The Transmission of Affect.

74. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 6.

75. Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 263n6.

77. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1 (my emphasis).

78. Thornber, Ecoambiguity. See especially part 2.

79. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 128–51.

80. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 5.

81. Quoted in Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 173.

1. Verghese, My Own Country, 14. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

2. Lise Diedrich also notes the similarity between human and microbial mobility. Diedrich, “AIDS and Its Treatments,” 241.

3. I use medical condition to remain faithful to the distinction between the human immunodeficiency virus, which compromises the immune system, and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which HIV causes and which manifests as susceptibility to opportunistic infections. Throughout the rest of this chapter, I follow cultural critics’ practice of referring to HIV/AIDS as disease, syndrome, or medical condition.

4. Weston, “Get Thee to a Big City,” 255.

6. The identity of the alleged but never confirmed “Patient Zero” for HIV crystallizes the mobility of the disease. In 1984, public health officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control named Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas as the index case for HIV infection in North America. Dugas purportedly carried the virus between Europe and North America on his assignments. Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On (1987) dramatizes the hunt for Patient Zero and underscores the importance of travel to AIDS research and representation. Shilts, And the Band Played On. For a critique of Shilts’s book, of Dugas’s stigmatization, and of the scientific validity of the Patient Zero concept, see Zero Patience, dir. John Greyson, film, 1993; and Wald, Contagious.

7. Modern Nature (1994), by British filmmaker Derek Jarman, and Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride (1999) fit neatly within this subgenre of nonurban AIDS memoirs.

8. Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place, 37; Scott Herring, Another Country. In addition to Weston and these scholars, anthropologists and socialists have pushed back against the urban focus of queer and AIDS studies. See also Bell and Valentine, “Queer Country”; Dorn and Laws, “Social Theory, Body Politics, and Medical Geography”; Howard, Men Like That; Johnson, Sweet Tea; and Phillips, Watt, and Shuttleton, De-Centering Sexualities.

9. This is only one piece of the epidemiological puzzle. Verghese’s research also identifies the phenomenon of “local-locals,” residents in the region who acquired the disease near their homes (395). AIDS gains a foothold in this population through tainted transfusions and sex with infected partners during visits to truck stops. Verghese’s paradigm first appeared in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. See Verghese, Berk, and Sarubbi, “Urbs in Rure.”

10. On My Own Country as a mode of narrative medicine, see De Moor, “The Doctor’s Role of Witness and Companion”; and Diedrich, “AIDS and Its Treatments.”

11. Kate Soper provides the terms nature-endorsing and nature-sceptical to refer to two perspectives on nature: as “discourse-independent” and as a product of cultural construction that “polic[es] social and sexual divisions.” Soper, What Is Nature? 7.

12. Philip Fisher’s telling phrase “privileged settings” refers to “ideal or simplified vanishing points toward which lines of sight and projects of every kind converge,” sites that “condense emotional facts.” Fisher, Hard Facts, 9, 11.

13. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, 181.

14. Grover, “Constitutional Symptoms,” 154.

15. The idea of “crimes against nature” has a legal and not only a discursive force. The accusation was leveled against sodomy, or “buggery,” in Europe for centuries before it entered American colonial law in the 1600s. See Eskridge, Dishonorable Passions. Verghese comments on a 1986 case in which the district attorney for Johnson City, Tennessee trotted out the state’s “crimes against nature” law to prosecute two men discovered having sex. Verghese cites the text of the law: “‘Crimes against nature, either with mankind or any beast, are punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary not less than five years, not more than fifteen.’ Included were all acts that did not result in procreation: cunnilingus, fellatio, and anal intercourse” (71). The 2003 U.S. Supreme Court Lawrence v. Texas decision proclaimed all state sodomy laws to be unconstitutional. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 538 (2003).

16. Simon Watney, “Taking Liberties: An Introduction,” in Carter and Watney, Taking Liberties, 21.

17. Gould, “The Terrifying Normalcy of AIDS.”

18. Treichler, “AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse.”

19. Quoted in ibid., 267. Treichler includes background on the biomedical research that led Langone to his conclusions (272).

20. Waldby, AIDS and the Body Politic, 20.

22. Rotello, Sexual Ecology, 1.

26. The antinaturalism of much metrocentric AIDS literature and queer theory has an antecedent in Oscar Wilde, whose dialogue “The Decay of Lying: An Observation” (1889) includes the following exclamation: “Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us…. My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.” Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” 3. My thanks to Neville Hoad for directing me to this reference.

27. Soper, What Is Nature? 133.

28. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 101. The question whether to appeal to or to eschew genetic reductionism remains germane to early twenty-first-century LGBTQ activism. See, for example, debates surrounding the search for the “gay gene” and Simon LeVay’s controversial positions on the brain mechanisms behind sexuality: Brookey, Reinventing the Male Homosexual; Hamer, The Science of Desire; LeVay, “A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure” and The Sexual Brain.

29. Soper, What is Nature? 135.

30. Marsh, Man and Nature, 11, iii.

31. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies, 83.

32. Botkin charts this intellectual history through the writings of Plato, Lucretius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, William Wordsworth, Aldo Leopold, and James Lovelock, among others.

33. Plotinus quoted in Botkin, Discordant Harmonies, 25. For other efforts to upend classical ecological models, see Barbour, “Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties”; and O’Neill, “Is It Time to Bury the Ecosystem Concept?”

34. A deep anthropocentrism can also undergird claims that earth is a harmonious system insofar as it is the sustenance of human life that determines an ecosystem’s health. This is known as the “anthropic principle,” the idea “that the fundamental laws of the universe are ‘tuned’ to permit the evolution of life and consciousness.” Botkin, Discordant Harmonies, 213n3.

36. Phillips, The Truth of Ecology. As other ecocritics have remarked, Phillips’s account of ecocriticism and of realism’s place within it can be reductive. That said, he drew needed attention to how scientific models circulate as metaphorical truths within environmental writing. See Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism; Heise, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism”; and Gifford, “Recent Critiques of Ecocriticism.” I take up Phillips’s claims again in chapter 3.

37. Social theorists of medicine are instructing today that somatic health is like Botkin’s “static landscape”: it never existed except in our imaginings of it. Writing “against health,” Jonathan Metzl cites Ivan Illich’s declaration that “health” “‘is the most cherished and destructive certitude of the modern world.’” Quoted in Metzl and Kirkland, Against Health, 5. “Destructive” because it turns pain and impairment into unnatural states based on clinical measures calibrated to generalized norms of somatic harmony. But it is health, these critics contend, that is the unnatural state, one that a person can only approach asymptotically and with the aid of technological interventions. Just as the “discordant harmony” about which Botkin writes is difficult to swallow because it challenges inherited norms, it is difficult to accept that the body is a stochastic system within which failure is normal (sensu Perrow). Perrow, Normal Accidents.

38. Greg Garrard has recently questioned the satisfactions of the category of health in environmental writing. He objects to “life writing about disease and death” that uses health as a normative value for gauging environmentalist and ecocritical projects. Garrard, “Nature Cures?” 494.

39. I am not discrediting the ecopolitical potential of aesthetic appreciation. Samuel Hays has shown that, as Americans accumulated discretionary income and leisure, they began spending this capital on outdoor recreation and travel. They thereby came to value and to protect environmental “amenities.” Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 4. These amenities had to have a particular character, however. Attracted by the majestic beauty and seeming permanence of the wilderness, nature photographers helped establish the picturesque and the healthy as constitutive of pristine nature (37).

40. Grover, North Enough, 7. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

41. It is worth noting that Grover’s and Wojnarowicz’s journeys are solitary. They are not interested in reviving utopian gay separatist communities.

42. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 211.

43. Liz Bury coined the term in Bury, “Tugging at Heart Strings.” Paradigmatic examples of each of these categories include Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir (2009); Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss (1997); Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow’s Story: A Memoir (2011); and Jean-Dominique Bauby, Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; 1997).

44. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 218.

45. “Still point” alludes to the “Burnt Norton” section (first published in 1936) of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943), lines from which form the epigraph to the memoir’s second section, “Cutover”: “To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. / In order to arrive at what you do not know / You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.” Grover, North Enough, 9.

46. Thoreau, Journal, 351.

47. Just as AIDS suffuses Grover’s environmental perception, it constructs her relation to time. Throughout the memoir, she marks time using friends’ dates of death. For example, “Perry died in September 1991. The following spring, I impulsively decided to buy a piece of the Minnesota dream: a cabin in the north woods” (5) and “the fall after James died, I took the train to Hudson Bay” (148). Like the AIDS artists whom Lauren Berlant studies, Grover inhabits “crisis time”: she “lives the present intensely,” but she does so through environmental immersion. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 59.

48. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 147.

49. It is worth noting that the memoir makes subtle comment on standards of gay male beauty as well as environmental beauty. Grover suggests that the body aesthetic dominant in San Francisco’s Castro district exacerbated the sense of self-loss that agonized gay men with AIDS. See the vignette featuring Eric (57–70).

50. Fetterley and Pryse, Writing Out of Place, 315, 316.

52. Verghese, My Own Country, 22, 294.

53. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies, 62.

54. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” 89.

55. Mortimer-Sandilands, “‘I Still Need the Revolution,’” 69.

56. Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 26. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

57. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 87. At the same time, because Wojnarowicz recounts the sexual and physical abuse he received as a child and his years in New York scoring drugs and funding his habit through prostitution, Close to the Knives also fits the subgenre of “misery” memoirs.

58. The political power of Delta Towels and other works by Wojnarowicz is clear from their use in antiobscenity campaigns. In 1990 Wojnarowicz sued the American Family Association under New York’s Artists’ Authorship Rights Act because the group reproduced his art in fund-raising materials. According to court documents, the American Family Association’s mission was to “promot[e] decency in the American society and advanc[e] the Judeo-Christian ethic in America.” Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association, at 1. The U.S. District Court of New York ruled in Wojnarowicz’s favor.

59. Johnson, Sweet Tea, 5.

60. Reviewer David Finkle notes the pitch of paranoia in this frequently repeated phrase and in the memoir’s overall tone. Finkle, “Postcards from America,” 239.

61. For a history of these drug therapies, see Zuniga et al., A Decade of HAART. For an account of antiretroviral therapies in AIDS treatment policies in the developing world, see Biehl, Will to Live.

62. Wojnarowicz was not HIV positive for all of the events that Close to the Knives relates. When I refer to Wojnarowicz as “sick,” I suggest either the seropositive status that came to light in the mid-1980s or to his status as lover, friend, and caregiver to other PWAs.

63. Todd R. Ramlow examines borderlands and borders such as fences in Close to the Knives as occasions for “an ongoing and mobile revisioning of subjectivity” that dismantles binarisms separating disabled from healthy and queer from hetero. Ramlow, “Bodies in the Borderlands,” 171.

64. Mumford, The City in History, 494.

65. The “universe”-al phrases that pepper Close to the Knives can grate on the reader. These phrases dichotomize “us and them” in a rhetoric that sounds too similar to suburbanites’ ideological and physical “subdividing.” Talk of “universes” and the “one-tribe nation” stifle nuance, but they enhance the memoir’s polemic against structural oppression and hate (37).

66. Smith, Uneven Development, 33.

67. In Close to the Knives, technomorphism updates the trope of body-environment merging. Elsewhere, the narrator ponders the body rendered electronic—“What do these eyes have to do with surveillance cameras? What do the veins running through my wrists have in common with electric wiring?” (63)—and decides that cyborgism is essential to his artistic project: “I’m the robotic kid with caucasian [sic] kid programming trying to short-circuit the sensory disks. I’m the robotic kid looking through digital eyes” (63). James Romberger’s illustrations for Seven Miles a Second (1996), a comic book roughly based on Wojnarowicz’s memoir, nicely translate the book’s interwoven organic and inorganic imagery. Wojnarowicz and Romberger, Seven Miles a Second.

68. The fluidity between Wojnarowicz’s identity and the prisoner’s, established through the repetition of “watery” in the first two sentences, indicates another of the memoir’s habits. Primarily through grammatical ambiguity, the narrator conflates his body parts with those of lovers and passersby (29), a city’s architecture with the bodies that inhabit it (32, 35), and a city with the disease that devastates it (30). In Seven Miles a Second, Wojnarowicz makes his desire to merge with another explicit: “If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other, I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time, I would.” Wojnarowicz and Romberger, Seven Miles a Second, 55.

69. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 3.

70. Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 209.

71. Ibid., 188. Altieri’s “intensity” is not cognate with Brian Massumi’s “intensity,” which is equivalent to autonomic affect. See Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 23–28.

72. Fisher, The Vehement Passions.

73. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 89, 95.

74. By contrast, the “I” of My Own Country is secure throughout, and Verghese’s memoir reads as the bildung of a rising doctor and new American.

75. Two groups of scholars join this phalanx: those who are rethinking depth hermeneutics and those who are interested in how interpretive modes inflect or even impinge on life practices. For the former efforts, see Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading”; and Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees. For the latter, see Anderson, The Way We Argue Now; and Love, “Close but not Deep.”

76. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 33.

77. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 124.

78. Felski, “Suspicious Minds,” 219.

79. The next chapter elaborates on Sedgwick’s claims with respect to Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker.

80. Cheng, “Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility,” 100–1. Latour’s cognate proposal is derived from his reading of Alan Turing: “What would critique do if it could be associated with more, not with less, with multiplication, not subtraction. Critical theory died away long ago; can we become critical again, in the sense here offered by Turing? That is, generating more ideas than we have received, inheriting from a prestigious critical tradition but not letting it die away.” Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 248.

81. Felski, “After Suspicion,” 31. Felski’s affective and political claims about suspicion become confusing as they multiply. Is suspicion bad because it blocks openness and pleasure? Or is it bad because it does not recognize that “it offers its own substantive pleasures?” Felski, “Suspicious Minds,” 228. Is suspicion bad because, in guarding himself against otherness, the critic shuts down a positive reading “that is equipped with momentous political implications?” Felski, Uses of Literature, 5. Or is it simply tired and banal and therefore politically impotent? Felski, “Suspicious Minds,” 231. As Felski’s suspicion is all of these things at once, her critique loses its teeth.

82. Felski, “Suspicious Minds,” 219–20.

83. Felski, Uses of Literature, 14.

84. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 124.

85. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 203.

86. Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 24.

88. Nixon, Slow Violence, 143.

89. Though environmental justice contests had been fought for decades, principles for the movement were first codified in 1991 at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, DC. For more on this history and the voices of the movement, see the first three chapters of Adamson, Evans, and Stein, The Environmental Justice Reader.

90. Like the material memoirists that Alaimo examines, Grover and Wojnarowicz validate firsthand experience. Unlike Alaimo’s authors, however, they do not necessarily incorporate hard scientific data in order to do so. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 87.

91. Epstein, Impure Science, 12.

93. This tension repeated itself in AIDS activists’ and educators’ relationship to the media. With or without malicious intent, newspapers, popular magazines, scholarly journals, and TV programs propagated inaccurate or incomplete information. Cindy Patton reports that “media science frequently articulated pre-existing stereotypes in a new, objective-sounding language…. While the media have been instrumental in raising social and medical awareness about AIDS, the reportage has consistently misrepresented the basic concepts of HIV, sensationalized faulty research, and selectively reported on conflicting data.” Patton, Inventing AIDS, 26–27. Even as they sought media attention, then, AIDS activists urged the public to take seriously frictions between what they read and what they felt of the disease.

94. International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, United Nations.

95. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 177.

96. Epstein, Impure Science, 336. See the following on how social health movements based challenges to medical consensus on individuals’ illness experience: Brown, Toxic Exposures; Corburn, Street Science; and Kroll-Smith and Floyd, Bodies in Protest.

97. Epstein, Impure Science, 337.

98. Di Chiro, “Local Actions, Global Visions,” 209.

99. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, “Introduction,” in Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, Queer Ecologies, 30.

100. Womack, “Suspicioning,” 145.

101. Soper, What Is Nature? 16.

1. Quoted in Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 303.

2. Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, xii.

3. For classic and latter-day accounts of the pastoral, see Bate, Romantic Ecology; Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral; Garrard, Ecocriticism; Gifford, Pastoral; Marx, The Machine in the Garden; and Williams, The Country and the City.

4. Yoon, “Luminous 3-D Jungle Is a Biologist’s Dream.”

6. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 56.

7. International Union for the Conservation of Nature, “Summary Statistics for Globally Threatened Species.”

8. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 56–57.

9. Smith, “Postmodernism and the Affective Turn.” Stephen Burn notes Powers’s “concern for the planet,” and elaborates that “Powers’s work is motivated by an ecological vision that tries to probe the glistening veneer of contemporary media reality … to reach the axis of interconnected life that lies beneath.” Powers, “An Interview with Richard Powers,” 164. Joseph Tabbi uses environmental metaphors to characterize the effect of Powers’s postmodernism: “his fiction is ecological in a wider sense, opening connective possibilities through disciplinary knowledge of the cultural environment, and written in a recursive language and self-reflexive style that produces the literary equivalent of an ecosystem.” Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions, 61. For a similar tendency to describe Powers’s texts through metaphors of ecology, see Atwood, “In the Heart of the Heartland.” Confirming his growing concern for ecological dilemmas, Powers participated in a symposium on environmental representation at Stanford University. Powers, “Environmental Writing in Four Dimensions: Fiction.”

10. Hale, “Aesthetics and the New Ethics,” 901.

11. Powers, The Gold Bug Variations, 592.

12. Powers, The Echo Maker, 359. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

13. Charles Harris coins the phrase neurological realism to distinguish Powers’s brand of realism from psychological realism à la Henry James and Virginia Woolf. My analysis follows Harris’s argument that Powers’s novels “foreground the effects of largely unconscious neurological activities” and “dismantle … dualisms on neuroscientific grounds.” Harris, “The Story of the Self,” 243-44.

14. Thomashow, Bringing the Biosphere Home, 57.

16. Carson, The Sense of Wonder, 42–43.

17. Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 36-37.

18. The tension between the pressures of fact and of feeling links Powers’s effort to that of the AIDS memoirists examined in chapter 2.

19. Powers, “The Art of Fiction,” 131.

20. Powers, The Gold Bug Variations, 611.

22. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 12.

23. Ibid., 18. Philosopher John Dewey’s claims for art echo Shklovsky’s and illuminate Karin’s wonder-filled experience: “Familiarity induces indifference…. Art throws off the covers that hide the expressiveness of things; it quickens us from the slackness of routine and enables us to forget ourselves by finding ourselves in the delight of experiencing the world about us in its varied qualities and forms.” Dewey, Art as Experience, 108.

24. The Echo Maker alludes to its own project later in the narrative. On one of her house visits, Mark’s rehabilitation nurse, Barbara, captivates Mark with an art history book entitled A Guide to Unseeing: 100 Artists Who Gave Us New Eyes (241).

25. Powers, “Making the Rounds,” 306.

26. Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 52.

27. Izard and Ackerman, “Motivational, Organizational, and Regulatory Functions of Discrete Emotions,” 257.

28. For Sara Ahmed, wonder is a historical and embodied relation because it accompanies new sight. It is “about learning to see the world as something that does not have to be, and as something that came to be, over time, and with work.” Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 180. The Echo Maker displays this dimension of wonder when it elaborates on the history of agricultural and tourist development in Buffalo County, particularly through references to Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918).

29. Fuller, Wonder, 101.

30. The oscillation between exposition and lyricism is different from the oscillation that Powers notes in a 2008 essay on his prose. He explains that “the novel I’m after functions as a kind of bastard hybrid, like consciousness itself, generating new terrain by passing ‘realism’ and ‘metafiction’ through relational processes, inviting identification at one gauge while complicating it at others.” Powers, “Making the Rounds,” 308. One can argue that The Echo Maker performs this operation through the postmodern tactics such as subjective inconsistency that critics such as Rachel Greenwald Smith have identified. Smith, “Postmodernism and the Affective Turn,” 424. But what interests me is how “new terrain” builds up when exposition and lyricism cooperate to generate wonder.

31. Quoted in Harris, “The Story of the Self,” 238. For a detailed analysis of the novel’s focalization techniques, see Herman and Varvaeck, “Capturing Capgras.”

32. This does not mean that The Echo Maker portrays extant research on human neurobiology as exhaustive, only that the narrator exhibits greater confidence when communicating insights from neuroscience.

33. Powers, The Gold Bug Variations, 592.

34. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 92.

37. This description sets the precedent for portraying Mark using zoomorphism and technomorphism, a technique that I will analyze further on.

38. Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, 7. For Fisher, only visual phenomena elicit wonder because one can take in both the whole and its details at once. Powers’s work suggests that he errs on this point. Nonsynchronous narrative arts perhaps best produce the “slow unfolding of attention” that wonder demands, as the recursivity of reading permits one to grasp details in a whole. Ibid., 6. As the next chapter will argue, this aspect of narrative is also crucial to the mechanics of disgust in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

40. Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” 328.

41. The Echo Maker’s account of the intermingling of familiarity and strangeness develops from Powers’s 1995 novel, Galatea 2.2. In this text, researcher Ram Gupta marvels at the precariousness of consciousness by adducing the case of prosopagnosics. These are people who can no longer recognize friends, celebrities, and even themselves due to brain injury. In an exchange with the protagonist, named Richard Powers, Ram remarks, “‘You know, I think the astonishing may be the ordinary by another name. But these results do lead us to many tempting guesses…. That everything you are capable of doing could be taken away from you, in discrete detail.’ [Richard] added to Ram’s list the obvious, the missing speculation…. That what you loved could go foreign without your ever knowing. That the eye could continue tracing familiarity, well into thought’s unknown regions.” Powers, Galatea 2.2, 299. Whereas Galatea 2.2 only speculates on this scenario, The Echo Maker examines it in situ.

42. Fuller, Wonder, 101.

43. Hirstein and Ramachandran, “Capgras Syndrome,” 437.

44. Feinberg and Keenan, “Where in the Brain Is the Self?” 667.

45. Powers, The Echo Maker, 102. For a history of how psychologists and neuroscientists have classified Capgras and how those classifications inform The Echo Maker, see Draaisma, “Echos, Doubles, and Delusions.”

46. Didactic moments such as those that I’m highlighting here do not appear in The Echo Maker as a continuous, sustained lesson. Rather, events in Weber’s life trigger exposition or, as in this case, the narrative delivers information without events obviously motivating it.

47. Later in the story, Karin references a People’s Free Dictionary entry for Frégoli syndrome that repeats the view that mental health and dysfunction are on a continuum. “Some researchers,” it reads, “suggest that all misidentification delusions may exist along a spectrum of familiar anomalies shared by ordinary, nonpathological consciousness” (261).

48. Smith also identifies oscillations between “recognizable and unrecognizable forms of consciousness” in The Echo Maker and maps this oscillation onto the novel’s dual commitments to “postmodernist distance … and psychological realism’s illusion of mimesis.” Smith, “Postmodernism and the Affective Turn,” 432, 433. She reads these oscillations as evidence that post-modernist techniques produce autonomic, pre-subjective affectivity.

49. The definition of place that emerges from The Echo Maker’s story-world accords with Buell’s concise definition of it: “space that is bounded and marked as humanly meaningful through personal attachment, social relations, and physiographic distinctiveness. Placeness, then, is co-constituted environmentally, socially, and phenomenologically through acts of perception.” Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 145. As I use it, environment is both broader than place and more active than perceptual. That is, in ecosickness fiction, the environment is not only a place that characters perceive and inhabit and that exerts pressure on their identities; it also elicits intervention in the form of manipulation and exploitation as well as concern, restoration, and protection.

50. Augé, Non-Places, 160.

51. The epigraph to part 1, which directly precedes this passage, contextualizes the use of the present tense. It reads, “We are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age” (1). Extracted from Nebraskan Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey (1957), which examines the traces of evolution in his surroundings, this line fuses past (“former existences”), present (“still carrying”), and future (“potential fossils”) and foreshadows the narrative’s deep account of crane behavior. Eiseley, The Immense Journey.

52. I use a less restricted meaning of geographical determinism than is current with geographers, historians, and anthropologists who use the phrase to mean that geography and climate have influenced the rise and fall of societies. I refer more broadly to how a place can limit or expand an individual’s life possibilities.

53. Marx, The Machine in the Garden, 109–10.

54. de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 47.

55. Iowa Beef Processors was one of the largest meat processing and packing corporations when Tyson Fresh Meats purchased it in 2001. In the novel, Mark works at the Lexington, Nebraska plant, which also figured in Eric Schlosser’s investigation of its slaughtering practices in Fast Food Nation (2001).

56. With Cather’s My Ántonia as an explicit intertext, The Echo Maker contributes to a literary tradition of deromanticizing Plains settlement through mental illness while simultaneously exalting the landscape for its wondrousness. Relating Mr. Shimerda’s failure to learn viable farming practices and his eventual suicide, Cather’s novel proves that the land can produce a bad sort of “flavor” just as often as a pleasant one. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1893, E. V. Smalley contextualizes Cather’s story of the Homestead Act’s failure to deliver economic opportunity and well-being to those in marginal populations: “an alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie States among farmers and their wives. In proportion to their numbers, the Scandinavian settlers furnish the largest contingent to the asylums.” Smalley, “The Isolation of Life on Prairie Farms,” 380.

57. See Mittal and Kawaai, “Freedom to Trade?”

58. Thomashow, Bringing the Biosphere Home, 57.

60. Cameron, Writing Nature, 44.

61. Powers, “The Last Generalist.”

62. Powers, “An Interview with Richard Powers,” 110.

63. For more on how vulnerability is built into complexity see Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; and Perrow, Normal Accidents.

64. Hacking, “Our Neo-Cartesian Bodies in Parts,” 80.

65. Zunshine, Strange Concepts, 55.

66. Defining Weber as a holist may sound contradictory given his rebuttal of the idea that we are “one, continuous, indivisible whole” (171). This is not inconsistent; the keywords in Weber’s statement are “continuous” and “indivisible.”

67. Immediately following these musings on the role of stories in neurology, Weber and Mark discuss xenotransplantation: “the growing body of experiments [in which] bits of cortex from one animal [are] transplanted into another, taking on the properties of the host area” (416). The juxtaposition of these scenes highlights the contrast between holistic approaches to treatment and surgical, functionalist approaches.

68. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, xii. The Echo Maker retells the experiments that led the researchers to their conclusions:

Every time the monkey [in Rizzolatti’s study] moved its arm, the neurons fired. One day, between measurements, the monkey’s arm neurons began firing like crazy, even though the monkey was perfectly still. More testing produced the mind-boggling conclusion: the motor neurons fired when one of the lab experimenters moved his arm. Neurons used to move a limb fired away simply because the monkey saw another creature moving, and moved its own imaginary arm in symbol-space sympathy.

(355)

69. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, xii.

70. Ibid. For an overview of research on the relationship between empathy and mirror neurons, see Gallese, “‘Being Like Me’”; and Iacobini, Mirroring People. Over the past decade, literary scholars have looked to cognitive approaches and models to rethink narrative’s capacity to activate or impede identification. See, especially, Boyd, On the Origin of Stories; Keen, Empathy and the Novel; and Zunshine, Strange Concepts.

71. Ivan Illich adduces the phenomenon of iatrogenesis in his critique of medicalization. He defines iatrogenesis as “any adverse condition in a patient occurring as the result of treatment by a physician or surgeon.” Illich, Medical Nemesis, 14.

72. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain, xii.

73. In its last pages, The Echo Maker reveals that Barbara caused Mark’s accident in her botched suicide attempt: she put herself in front of Mark’s speeding car on North Line Road. In part 1, however, Karin believes Barbara’s attentive care for Mark is selfless and not her surreptitious way of atoning for her actions.

74. Commoner, The Closing Circle, 33. John Muir’s oft-cited reflection also resonates here: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra, 211.

75. Phillips, The Truth of Ecology, 45.

77. The following works also trace the shift away from models of ecological harmony and equilibrium: Barbour, “Ecological Fragmentation in the Fifties”; Botkin, Discordant Harmonies; O’Neill, “Is it Time to Bury the Ecosystem Concept?”; and Worster, Nature’s Economy.

78. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 126.

79. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 3.

80. The paranoiac’s quest to expose hidden plots, another feature that Sedgwick outlines, is also relevant to The Echo Maker. The novel is, in part, a detective story. An indecipherable clue to the cause of Mark’s accident—a note scrawled in a “spidery, ethereal” hand—guides the plot (10). It appears at Mark’s bedside in the trauma unit and delivers this message: “I am No One / but Tonight on North Line Road / GOD led me to you / so You could Live / and bring back someone else” (10). Readers learn that Barbara is the addressee of these verses and Mark its author. He penned the note, which anticipates the novel’s outcome, before he slipped into his coma.

81. The following reviews represent the various positions on Powers’s preoccupation with complexity: Deresiewicz, “Science Fiction”; Michiko Kakutani, “Imaginary Lives, Built in Empty Rooms”; and Sutherland, “Paper or Plastic?”

82. Powers, The Gold Bug Variations, 611.

85. Ibid. With different motives and outcomes, Jan raises the questions about the ethical implications of technoscientific change that motivate Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and that I analyze in chapter 5.

87. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 24, 146.

88. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, 3.

89. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 150.

90. Powers, The Gold Bug Variations, 245.

91. Claudine Herzlich places this principle in a historical context, arguing that “medicine long failed to recognize the psychological and social consequences of labelling illness and felt that while diagnosis and treatment could sometimes be of no use, they could never be harmful. Hence the medical rule that it is better to mistakenly diagnose a healthy man as sick than a sick man as healthy.” Herzlich, “Modern Medicine and the Quest for Meaning,” 159.

92. This tenet appears in book 1 of Hippocrates’s Epidemics.

93. As Karin’s position relative to environmental endangerment evolves, her position on caring for Mark changes as well. She no longer makes him her life’s project nor defines his health in her own terms. “The goals of care had changed,” the narrator announces. “She no longer needed him to recognize her. She only needed him to believe he was alive” (398).

94. Harrison, Gardens, 25.

95. Even Daniel admits, “‘those birds are doomed’” (56).

96. This book’s conclusion takes up the possibilities for optimism in a sick world.

97. Deresiewicz disagrees with the first part of this claim. He chastises Powers for not “letting the story speak,” and argues that Daniel ventriloquizes Powers’s principles, leaving no room for readers’ objections. Deresiewicz, “Science Fiction,” 28. “The novelist who refuses to grant his readers imaginative and moral freedom—the two are the same, and connected to the characters’ own autonomy—is serving neither the cause of art nor of justice,” he pronounces. Ibid. Deresiewicz misses one of the novel’s central projects, however: to wrangle with the meaning of autonomy in the face of the complex connectedness that neural and environmental damage bring to light.

98. Caldwell, “Awakenings.”

99. Slovic, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing, 14.

1. See chapter 1n16.

2. Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 46.

3. “Plane Stupid.” Credit for the rise of “subvertising,” advertising that aims to subvert the paradigms of growth and consumption, goes to Canadian magazine Adbusters.

4. Other frames from the video call on viewers’ memories of the iconic and much debated image of the “falling man” who jumped out of the burning North Tower of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. This evocation is clearly deliberate, given that the group is targeting air travel and that planes were the weapons in Al Qaeda’s plot.

5. Morton, Ecology Without Nature, 159.

6. Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley, “Disgust,” 757.

7. Pole, “Disgust and Other Forms of Aversion,” 228, 226.

8. Wallace, “Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 131.

9. Ibid., 132. Letter to Michael Pietsch dated 22 June 1992, quoted in Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 173.

10. Hobbes, Leviathan, 38.

11. The text deliberately muddles the translation between “Subsidized Time” and the Gregorian calendar; these are best guesses.

12. The play in this acronym already points to one of Infinite Jest’s targets: the many forms of self-absorption that plague contemporary America.

13. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 666. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

14. Wallace, “Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 127.

15. David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993) in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 37. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

16. The intelligence community has another name for “Infinite Jest”: the samizdat. Hal defines this insurgent cultural form as “‘the sub-rosa dissemination of politically charged materials that were banned when the … Kremlin was going around banning things. Connotatively, the generic meaning now is any sort of politically underground or beyond-the-pale press or the stuff published thereby” (1011n110).

17. In “Infinite Jest”’s other scene, Joelle repeatedly walks through a revolving door until she glimpses someone familiar revolving in the opposite direction. They continue to revolve, pursuing each other, for several rotations. This is only one account of the film’s content. The variety of inconsistent accounts and the contexts of interrogation in which they emerge make the actual content uncertain. See Molly Notkin’s version on 788f.

18. Wallace, “An Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 127.

19. In Infinite Jest, “E Unibus Pluram” is O.N.A.N.’s ironic motto.

20. Wallace would undoubtedly agree with art historian Rosalind Krauss when she argues that “video’s real medium is a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object—an Other—and invest it in the Self,” quoted in Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” 52.

21. David Foster Wallace, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” (1996) in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, 261.

22. Wallace, “Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 150.

23. “A Failed Entertainment” was Wallace’s original title for Infinite Jest.

24. Wallace’s complex sentence structures and diction direct attention to the author’s grammatical and lexical choices. Similarly, the details of Wallace’s biography encourage us to examine the minutiae of his writing. Wallace’s mother, Sally Foster, authored a grammar primer entitled Practically Painless English and inspired Avril Incandenza’s profession in Infinite Jest. Avril, who succeeds her husband as dean of E.T.A., is a strict grammarian who polices her charges’ English. Wallace addresses questions of grammar and usage directly in his 2001 Harper’s essay, “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” which appears as “Authority and American Usage” in Consider the Lobster.

25. Oatley, Best Laid Schemes, 56.

26. Feagin, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” 97.

27. Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 59.

28. Jameson, Postmodernism, 48–49.

29. Wallace does not, however, celebrate art’s capitulation to capitalist dictates of profit and entertainment. As “E Unibus Pluram” suggests, he seeks an emotionally—if not necessarily politically—redemptive fiction, but the trope of “distance” is a precarious one for Wallace.

30. Packard, The Waste Makers, 6.

33. Hayles, “The Illusion of Autonomy,” 685.

34. The policy of distancing also links the novel’s waste and tennis plots. One of Jim Incandenza’s films explains that the goal of tennis is precisely to send away a ball that you hope your opponent will not return.

35. By no means is Infinite Jest’s United States pollution-free, however. While many features distinguish Boston’s affluent neighborhoods from the squalid ones, trash is a great equalizer. As Don Gately cruises from Enfield to Cambridge, the narrator inventories the abundant litter: “an odd little tornado of discarded ad-leaflets and glassine bags and corporate-snack bags and a syringe’s husk and filterless gasper [i.e., cigarette]-butts and general crud and a flattened Millennial Fizzy cup” (479). This “tornado of waste” ruining Boston’s streets in fact forms the city’s bedrock (479). Litter “eventually becomes part of the composition of the street. A box is like intaglioed into the concrete of the sidewalk” (583). Together, these descriptions of pollution prove the failure of C.U.S.P.’s agenda for a “Tighter, Tidier Nation.”

36. It is worth noting that Mario’s is only one reconstruction of the birth of O.N.A.N. The narrator makes it clear that the show is a parody of his father’s parody of the historical events (see 400 and 438).

37. Wallace, The Broom of the System, 53.

38. “KAB: A Beautiful History,” Keep America Beautiful, accessed 26 March 2013, http://www.kab.org/site/PageServer?pagename=kab_history. TV viewers know this group from its iconic and much criticized “Crying Indian” advertising campaign from the 1970s. The novel alludes to this campaign when Orin Incandenza reminisces about the broadcast era of TV: “‘I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter’” (599).

39. Packard, The Waste Makers, 238.

40. Nash, Inescapable Ecologies, 7.

43. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2, 15.

44. Elizabeth Freudenthal shares my interest in the biomedical imagination of the novel but focuses on how it produces an “anti-interior selfhood” as characters exteriorize identity through compulsive relations with the object world. Freudenthal, “Anti-Interiority,” 193.

45. Hayles, “The Illusion of Autonomy,” 676.

47. The ATHSCME company produces fans for blowing waste over the U.S.-Canada border.

48. To put this in geographer Neil Smith’s terms, “By producing the means to satisfy their needs, human beings collectively produce their own material life, and in the process produce new human needs whose satisfaction requires further productive activity” and, I add, further damage. Smith, Uneven Development, 55.

49. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 31.

52. For a history of the city-body symbolic form, see Sennett, Flesh and Stone.

53. Grosz, “Bodies-Cities,” 47.

54. Merriam-Webster Medical Desk Dictionary, s.v. “anhedonia,” accessed 22 October 2011, http://www2.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/mwmedsamp.

55. Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 49.

56. Jameson, Postmodernism, 53.

57. Smith, Uneven Development, 45.

58. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 57.

59. Grover, North Enough, 18.

60. Grosz, “Bodies-Cities,” 43.

62. Jameson, Postmodernism, 38.

64. Stephen J. Burn examines the “bodily gestalts [that] are a recurring feature of Wallace’s fiction.” Burn, “‘Webs of Nerves Pulsing and Firing,’” 64. Burn uses this observation to launch a discussion of the theories of mind that circulate in Wallace’s writings.

65. The Student Union enters the narrative because it houses WYYY, the studio where Joelle van Dyne records her radio program, the “Madame Psychosis Hour.”

66. Kolodny, The Lay of the Land; and Westling, The Green Breast of the New World.

67. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 133.

68. Forster, Howards End, 105.

69. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 89.

70. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 12.

73. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 89.

75. Wallace, “Interview with David Foster Wallace,” 127.

76. Russell, “Some Assembly Required,” 157.

78. I assign this particular thought to Mario, but note that focalization shifts away from this character with the use of “bullshit” and the third-person reference to him (“boy”).

79. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 108.

80. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xxiv.

81. Russell, “Some Assembly Required,” 164.

83. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 15.

84. Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverance of Others, 13–15. One of Palumbo-Liu’s departures for thinking through affective invasion is Teresa Brennan’s eponymous study of the “transmission of affect.” Brennan identifies how the communicability of emotion draws attention to our vulnerability to our human surroundings.

85. Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 15.

86. Pole, “Disgust and Other Forms of Aversion,” 221.

87. Kakutani, “A Country Dying of Laughter.”

88. This point hints at D. A. Miller’s question of whether style, because it is so conspicuous—even flamboyant, is excessive by nature. See Miller, Jane Austen, 8, 18.

89. Quoted in Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 281.

90. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

93. Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley, “Disgust,” 757.

94. Wallace’s exhaustively titled short story, “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright’s Father Begs a Boon,” confirms this point. As the narrator deteriorates from a cluster of diseases, he confesses that his newborn son’s too-bodily body disgusted him. The child teaches the father “to despise the body, what it is to have a body—to be disgusted, repulsed.” Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 259. “What it is to have a body” was a source of trouble for the anxiety-prone Wallace. He initially donned his signature white bandana to control his profuse sweating and sometimes took multiple showers a day. Avid readers of Wallace know that a lot of sweat dampens the pages of Infinite Jest and his stories.

95. Quoted in Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 83.

96. Powers, The Echo Maker, 166.

97. Catherine Nichols argues that carnivalesque elements such as irony, metafiction, and polyphonic intertextuality serve “not only to de-center empty avant-gardism … but to defamiliarize the hallmarks of classic realism.” Nichols, “Dialogizing Postmodern Carnival,” 14. She concurs with Tom LeClair, who holds that narrative techniques such as “multiple points of view, both first- and third-person; stylistic tours de force in several dialects; a swirling associative structure; and alternations in synecdochic scale” distance the novel from the “‘soothing, familiar and anesthetic’” packaging of realism. LeClair, “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers,” 35.

98. Quoted in Max, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, 173.

99. Probyn, “Writing Shame,” 86.

100. Focusing on disgust also takes us outside the novel’s own seductive mind. Infinite Jest is, like the film it imagines, “so bloody compelling” that the scholarship on it can get stuck in the text’s own terms of recursivity, solipsism, irony, and undecidability (839).

101. Miller’s study, published the year after Infinite Jest, appears in the David Foster Wallace Library at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Wallace’s underlining, asterisks, and other annotations show that his fascination with the emotion continued as he began work on future stories and The Pale King (2011). Several themes especially attract Wallace’s pen: the idea of disgust as an assertion of the subject’s superiority “that at the same time recognizes the vulnerability of that superiority to the defiling powers of the low”; the bodily orifices that produce disgust (anus, vagina, nose, etc.); and the claim that “to feel disgust is human and humanizing.” Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 9, 11.

102. Ibid., 180–81.

103. Of course, this universality is illusory. We need only consider that food tolerances differ so radically across cultures: one man’s delicacy is another’s emetic. Still, we expect disgust to “work” within given cultural parameters and trust that our body’s immediate responses may model a norm for all.

104. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 336.

106. Cousins, “The Ugly (Part 1),” 64.

107. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8.

108. Hobbes, Leviathan, 38.

109. Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, x.

110. Bourdieu, Distinction, 494.

111. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 85.

112. Pole, “Disgust and Other Forms of Aversion,” 225. In this respect, disgust shares the general oscillatory form of wonder as analyzed in chapter 3.

115. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3, 10.

116. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 89.

117. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 79.

118. The phrase appears in Hal’s seventh-grade essay on the evolving role of the TV hero. He predicts that the individual who will supersede the “‘post’-modern” hero will be “a hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus” (142).

119. Wallace, This Is Water, 120.

120. Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions, 51.

121. On this point, the play between humor and disgust in Infinite Jest requires comment. I believe that the humor of the novel dissipates over time under the pressure of its content. As Wallace told David Lipsky right after the novel came out, it’s “supposed to be sort of fun and unfun. For instance, I like a joke that you laugh hard at, but then it’s sort of unsettling, and you think about it for a while. It’s not quite black humor, but it’s a kind of, a kind of creepy humor.” Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, 272. Humor no longer dominates as scenes of pain and anguish accumulate. Flooded by passages depicting pain, engaged readers reflect on why stuff that had once been so funny now feels sometimes disgusting, sometimes sad.

122. Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions, 51.

1. The early 2000s see a return of anxieties about nuclear weapons in the U.S. that cooled down with the gradual dismantling of the communist bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These anxieties reemerge and shift to the new centers of U.S. geopolitical and military engagement: the Middle and Far East.

2. Andrew Ross examines how urban renewal projects in New York City stigmatized and displaced the poor and the sick in the 1960s and 1970s. “In public language,” he argues, “‘urban problems’ has become a codeword for race.” Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, 138.

In an essay Piercy refers to cities as “grids of Them-and-Us experiences” built around cultural and economic distinctions. Piercy, “The City as Battleground,” 209. She relates a childhood memory of the 1943 Detroit race riot, which set a precedent for the wave of race-motivated uprisings in the 1960s and 1970s that occurred while Piercy was writing Woman on the Edge of Time.

3. Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, 190. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Mattapoisett is a Wampanoag word for “resting place” and is a town on the Cape in Massachusetts.

4. Though the chart puts the main diegesis under suspicion, it is inaccurate; it misstates Connie’s heritage, designating her Puerto Rican rather than Mexican. For this reason and because it comes from the reviled doctors, it does not have the final word on Connie’s condition or the preceding narrative.

5. For Jameson, the “fundamental anxiety of Utopia” is “the fear of losing that familiar world in which all our vices and virtues are rooted (very much including the very longing for Utopia itself) in exchange for a world in which all these things and experiences—positive as well as negative—will have been obliterated.” Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 97.

6. Anderson, “The River of Time,” 76.

7. Stability does not mean universal harmony and happiness. Interpersonal and internecine conflicts do exist in Mattapoisett, most notably a battle between Luciente’s people and the “few but determined” members of a rapacious society of “androids, robots, [and] cybernauts” (261).

8. For a primer on neoliberal economics, see Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

9. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 569, 475. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

10. Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas, 141.

11. Joni Adamson, “‘¡Todos Somos Indios!’” 6. T.V. Reed shares Adamson’s interest in the compatibility of the environmental justice and decolonization movements in Almanac. Reed, “Toxic Colonialism.” On the novel’s environmental politics, see also Ammons, Brave New Words; Barber, “Wisecracking Glen Canyon Dam,” 127–43; Bowers, “Eco-Criticism in a (Post-)Colonial Context”; O’Meara, “The Ecological Politics”; and Teale, “The Silko Road from Chiapas.”

12. Several characters iterate Old Yoeme’s message. Calabazas, a wizened Mexican-Yaqui drug smuggler; Clinton, “the first Black Indian” and a leader of the Army of the Homeless (404); Tacho and his twin, El Feo; and the preachers at the International Holistic Healers Convention.

13. Silko, “The Fourth World,” 125.

14. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, 29.

16. Chapter 2 identifies the residue of this desire in David Wojnarowicz’s quasi-Emersonian yearnings for fluidity between self and other beings.

17. Allen, The Sacred Hoop, 119.

18. Silko, Ceremony, 116.

19. Reed delineates three forms of restoration in Almanac: the return of the lands to tribes, the feeling of sacred connection to and stewardship for those lands, and the vitality of the Earth writ large. Reed, “Toxic Colonialism.”

20. Almanac has a pantribal reach. All Indian people—from the Yaquis in the southwest U.S. to the Eskimos in the Arctic Circle—have tribally specific stories and relations to the land, but they share affinities with others. For readings of the novel’s pantribalism and transamericanism, see Adamson, American Indian Literature; Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas; Jarman, “Exploring the World of the Different”; Karem, The Romance of Authenticity; Krupat, Turn to the Native; Olmsted, “The Uses of Blood”; and Sadowski-Smith, Border Fictions.

21. The idea of a naturalized connection between people and land evokes N. Scott Momaday’s controversial trope of “blood memory.” According to Chadwick Allen, this trope involves “the assertion of an unmediated relationship to indigenous land bases … the continuation of oral traditions … and the power of the indigenous writer’s imagination to establish communion with ancestors.” Allen, Blood Narrative, 178. Allen notes that Arnold Krupat and others have objected that the blood memory trope is “‘absurdly racist.’” Ibid., 271n45. Almanac potentially circumvents this criticism due to its pantribalism.

22. Almanac is made up of six parts, which contain between one and eight books that are further divided into chapters.

23. As in Ceremony, the estranged male character in Almanac reestablishes his connection to place and tribe when he recognizes the role of uranium mining in tribal and global history. Tayo trespasses onto a government-owned mine, and his link to both the Laguna people and Japanese victims of the atomic bomb overwhelms him. This epiphany completes his healing ceremony. Almanac, by comparison, depicts mining after the worldwide collapse in uranium prices in the 1980s that forced the temporary closure of all U.S. open-pit mines in 1992. The mines were left, serving as reminders of environmental injustice.

24. I return to Almanac’s ending and question the closure it provides in the final section of this chapter.

25. For a critique of Almanac’s leveling of “the complexity of [Europeans’] moral and spiritual history,” see Garrard, “Ecocriticism,” 55.

26. Indigenous Alliance of the Americas on 500 Years of Resistance, “Declaration of Quito.”

27. See, for example, the parodic list of events on the convention schedule (717). Almanac critics tend to take the event at face value, but the episode’s farcical aspects undermine any purely earnest reading.

28. “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth.”

29. Silko relates the origins of Lecha’s character in “Notes on Almanac of the Dead.” Silko, Yellow Woman, 137–38. This essay mentions other correspondences between people and events in the novel and in Silko’s own life.

30. Bowers, “Eco-Criticism in a (Post-)Colonial Context,” 275–76.

31. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 83.

33. See Mogen for a reading of Almanac as a work of “scientific speculation.” Mogen, “Native American Visions of Apocalypse,” 159.

34. Adamson, American Indian Literature, 169.

35. Silko relocated to the Tucson area from Laguna, New Mexico in 1978 and, with support from a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant, wrote Almanac there.

36. Allen, Biosphere 2, 10.

37. Suplee, “Brave Small World.”

38. For official histories of the project, see ibid.; Allen, Biosphere 2; and Alling, Nelson, and Silverstone, Life Under Glass. The following newspaper accounts detail and critique the project: Chandler, “An Earthbound Ark Sets Sail”; Lew, “Peering into a World Under Glass”; Toufexis, “The Wizards of Hokum”; and Walker, “Home, Sweet Biome.”

39. For example, Chandler, “An Earthbound Ark Sets Sail.”

40. Cooper, “Profits of Doom,” 31–32.

41. On Almanac’s depiction of coalition building, see Adamson, “‘¡Todos Somos Indios!’”; Olmsted, “Uses of Blood”; O’Meara, “The Ecological Politics”; Reed, “Toxic Colonialism”; Romero, “Envisioning a ‘Network of Tribal Coalitions’”; and Sadowski-Smith, Border Fictions.

42. Admittedly, both Clinton and environmentalism come across as caricatures here. Later sections of this chapter elaborate on characterization in Almanac.

43. Clinton’s views resonate with social theorist Andrew Ross’s analysis of anti-immigration groups in the southwest U.S. who are “tapping a deep vein of public anxiety that connects the defense of pristine resources to the defense of racial purity.” Ross, Bird on Fire, 192. See also The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, 237–73.

44. Devall and Sessions, Deep Ecology, 70.

On the population question, Almanac again refracts contemporary debates. Between the 1970s and 1990s, the overpopulation issue fractured major environmental groups, the Sierra Club most notably, because population control was too easily associated with racism. Jennifer Ludden substantiates this fear in her report on how anti-immigration groups couch their stances in environmentalist rhetoric. Ludden, “Ads Warn That Immigration Must Be Reduced.” For accounts of the schism within the Sierra Club, see Knickerbocker, “A ‘Hostile’ Takeover Bid at the Sierra Club”; and Davila, “Immigration Dispute Spawns Factions.” Ian Angus and Simon Butler have recently surveyed and critiqued the “myth of overpopulation.” Angus and Butler, Too Many People? ix.

45. Angus and Butler, Too Many People? 115.

46. Guha, “Radical American Environmentalism,” 74.

47. Ibid., 75, 74n2.

48. Waldby, The Visible Human Project, 136.

50. Rebecca Tillett develops this line of argument through a reading of Beaufry, whose “assurance of his own superiority both parodies and exposes the ideological biases within the policies by which science, technology, and industry organize their hierarchies of social and natural significance.” Tillett, “Reality Consumed by Realty,” 157–58.

51. For a reading of how disability and homosexuality constitute borderland identities, see Jarman, “Exploring the World of the Different.” I share Jarman’s interest in Almanac’s eugenic tropes, but disagree that those with “alternative” identities necessarily offer efficacious models of agency in the novel. Ibid., 161.

52. Stein, Shifting the Ground, 210.

54. Stanford, “‘Human Debris,’” 26.

55. Waldby, The Visible Human Project, 18.

56. Rabinow and Rose, “Biopower Today,” 198.

57. Almanac’s critique of technology is not absolute. Digital and communications technologies serve the revolutionary projects of Zeta, Lecha, and others. Televisions are conduits for Native prophecies, and computers preserve the ancient almanacs. Most importantly, Zeta enlists South Korean programmer, Awa Gee, in the transamerican revolution. Gee develops algorithms to spy on the enemies, hacks into the electrical grid, and builds detonators for the bombs Ferro sets off throughout Tucson. While Zeta has misgivings about the latter project (736), the novel endorses technological interventions as tools for resistance so long as they do not alter the very matter of life.

58. Tillett, “Reality Consumed by Realty,” 156.

59. Hacking, “Our Neo-Cartesian Bodies in Parts,” 78.

62. Heise, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism,” 509.

63. Barkun, “Divided Apocalypse,” 263.

66. For studies of apocalypticism in American thought and culture, see Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More; Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life; Dewey, In a Dark Time; Robinson, American Apocalypses; and Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse. Apocalypticism’s role in Anglo-American environmental discourse is addressed in Buell, The Environmental Imagination; and Garrard, Ecocriticism.

67. A handful of times, Almanac references the Ghost Dance religion, an apocalyptic American Indian belief system that emerged in the U.S. West in the 1880s. At the Healers Convention, the Lakota Wilson Weasel Tail reminds the audience of the Ghost Dance that believers performed to connect them with ancestral spirits. According to the Lakota strain of the religion, the ancestors would converge into a “spirit army” that would overthrow white rule and restore tribal lands to their rightful stewards (724). Given the novel’s apocalypticism, it is perhaps surprising that the Ghost Dance does not figure as prominently here as it does in Silko’s next novel, Gardens in the Dunes (1999). However, because the Ghost Dance syncretized Christian and Native spirituality, it might not have fit with Almanac’s censure of Western belief systems.

68. See Revelations 6:12, 16:2–4, and 16:12–18 for references to these same catastrophes.

69. On this point, we can think back to the serial killer anecdote analyzed previously, in which “tending” becomes a euphemism for murder.

70. Silko, Yellow Woman, 139.

71. As Patricia Limerick notes, development in the “new West” often grows out of the idea that its so-called open spaces can remedy physiological, societal, and psychological ailments: “dry air to cure respiratory problems, open spaces to relieve the pressures that weigh down the soul in teeming cities, freedom and independence to provide a restorative alternative to mass society’s regimentation and standardization.” Limerick, Something in the Soil, 277. These hopes presuppose the taming of the West, in particular its forbidding deserts and mountains, that Leah Blue undertakes. On patterns of greenwashed politics and real estate development in early twenty-first-century Arizona, see Ross, Bird on Fire.

72. To support her claims that “people wanted to have water around them in the desert,” Leah earlier cites “market research [that] had repeatedly found new arrivals in the desert were reassured by the splash of water” (374–75). The fictional Venice, Arizona evokes a turn-of-the-century development in Southern California also named Venice, a “lagoon-laced Los Angeles suburb keyed to the Mediterranean metaphor.” Starr, California, 151.

73. Quoted in Tuan, Topophilia, 67. For rejoinders to desert “place bashing,” see Glotfelty, “Literary Place Bashing”; and Lynch, Xerophilia.

74. On this representational tendency, see Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, 73.

75. Harris Feinsod offered this helpful gloss.

76. While it is true that there is almost no positive expression of sexuality in Almanac, the novel’s impenitent use of male same-sex desire to mark moral turpitude (in Serlo and Beaufry, David, and others) undermines the novel’s critique of those who do the same with racial, ethnic, and class positioning.

77. Massumi, “Preface,” viii.

78. Several scholars address Almanac’s engagement with Mayan texts and prophecy. See Adamson, American Indian Literature; Fischer-Hornung, “Economics of Memory”; Horvitz, “Freud, Marx, and Chiapas”; Mogen, “Native American Visions of the Apocalypse”; Olmsted, “Uses of Blood”; Reinecke, “Overturning the (New World) Order”; and Van Dyke, “From Big Green Fly to the Stone Serpent.”

79. Killingsworth and Palmer, “Millennial Ecology,” 22.

82. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 285.

83. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, xi.

84. Quoted in ibid., 5.

86. My thanks to Kiara Vigil for pointing me to Apess’s writing.

87. The last section of this chapter addresses how Silko’s novel also innovates on its titular genre, Mayan and early American almanacs.

88. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 23.

90. Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 308.

91. Several critics, most notably Adamson, have elaborated on Almanac’s “quality of prophecy.” Adamson, American Indian Literature, 128. In particular, they note the correspondence between the novel and the Zapatista liberation group that emerged in Chiapas, Mexico in 1994 to combat the decimation of Mayan lands and culture and to influence Mexican politics. See also Adamson, “‘¡Todos Somos Indios!’”; Horvitz, “Freud, Marx, and Chiapas”; Romero, “Envisioning a ‘Network of Tribal Coalitions’”; and Sadowski-Smith, Border Fictions. In “An Expression of Profound Gratitude to the Zapatistas, January 1, 1994,” Silko situates the Zapatista rebellion as a continuation of her ancestors’ stories of resistance to the “destroyers.” Silko, Yellow Woman, 153.

92. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 23.

93. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 29.

94. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 75.

98. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 215.

99. Ibid., 236, 246.

101. See Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 42; and Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 232, on Heidegger. Ngai elaborates a genealogy of the claim that anxiety “has no concrete thing or ‘entity-within-the-world’ as its object.” Ibid., 393n35.

102. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3.

103. Killingsworth and Palmer, “Millennial Ecology,” 23.

104. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 393n35.

105. St. John, “Almanac of the Dead,” 124.

106. Jones, “Reports from the Heartland,” 81.

107. Knickerbocker, “Dark Beauty, Bright Terror,” 13.

108. As Adamson has shown, the novel also makes readers uncomfortable because it violates their expectations for an “authentic” Native American novel. Adamson, American Indian Literature, 130. Depicting “genocide, resistance, and rebellion,” Almanac speaks to ethnically and racially coded discomfort with Native activists’ place in the literary canon and in politics. Ibid., 134.

109. One citizen reviewer on Amazon.com describes it as “jumpy,” which could refer either to the plot or to its effect on the reader. Kuzyk, “An Excellent Book …”

110. A text can, of course, misfire even more drastically and miss its target. Even in this case the critic’s dismissal of Almanac depends on the enormity of the book’s intentions. Sven Birkerts roundly and controversially dismisses Silko’s vision: “That the oppressed of the world should break their chains and retake what’s theirs is not an unappealing idea (for some), but it is so contrary to what we know both of the structures of power and the psychology of the oppressed that the imagination simply balks…. [Silko’s] premise of revolutionary insurrection is tethered to airy nothing. It is, frankly, naive to the point of silliness.” Birkerts, “Apocalypse Now,” 41.

111. Tallent, “Storytelling with a Vengeance.”

112. Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 201.

113. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 246.

114. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, 51.

117. Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 75.

118. Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 201; Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse, 76.

119. Reed, “Toxic Colonialism,” 37.

120. Silko, “An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko (1994),” 145.

122. Ibid. Brackets in original.

123. It’s worth noting that, in a 1992 interview, Silko retracts the idea of radical revolution entirely, declaring, “‘the only revolution I truly believe in is one of awareness of perception. At the end of my novel, I try to show the awareness or the change moving to be something organic, a part of this continent and something inclusive, which is the American Indian way. I would hope it would be a gentle revolution over hundreds and hundreds of years.’” Kelleher, “Predicting a Revolt to Reclaim the Americas.”

124. For another example, see one paragraph on page 264: “Menardo sits back … Menardo checks his reflection … Menardo sees a man … Menardo refuses to be stared down … Menardo drops his eyes … Menardo admires the parachute.”

125. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 24.

128. Ibid., 135. For alternate readings of Bartolomeo’s execution, see Adamson, American Indian Literature, 156; and Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas, 160–61.

129. Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier, 23.

130. OED Online, s.v. “almanac, n.,” Oxford University Press, last modified September 2012, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/5564?rskey=ghfTeI&result=1&isAdvanced=false. Almanac of the Dead offers the following definition for its eponym:

1. almanakh: Arabic.

2. almanac: A.D. 1267 English from the Arabic.

3. almanaque: A.D. 1505 Spanish from the Arabic.

4. a book of tables containing a calendar of months and days with astronomical data and calculations.

5. predicts or foretells the auspicious days, the ecclesiastical and other anniversaries.

6. short glyphic passages give the luck of the day.

7. Madrid

Paris	Codices
Dresden		(136)

131. My point accords with Adamson’s reading of the almanac as a “challenge [to] the very notion of authoritative discourse.” Adamson, American Indian Literature, 134.

132. Critics who read the novel as restorative tend to focus their analysis on this last chapter. See, for example, Norden, “Ecological Restorations.”

133. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 246–47.

1. Ward, “NOAA’s 2012 Arctic ‘Report Card.’”

2. See Adamson, “For the Sake of the Land and All People”; and Alaimo, “The Trouble with Texts.”

3. Hawken, Blessed Unrest, 7.

4. Ibid., 8. Other recent treatises on environmental hope include Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism; Solnit, Hope in the Dark; Speth, America the Possible; and Wohlforth, The Fate of Nature.

5. Wallace, Infinite Jest, 694.

6. Sharot, Korn, and Dolan, “How Unrealistic Optimism Is Maintained,” 1475.

7. Mims, “80 Percent of Humans Are Delusionally Optimistic.”

8. Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, 17.

10. Quoted in ibid. Ehrenreich goes on to point out the residues of Calvinism in the movements that took shape around positive thinking in the nineteenth century. Ibid., 69.

11. Powers, “What Does Fiction Know?”

12. Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, 8. Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” similarly reassesses optimism but from the perspective of cultural affect studies. As I noted in chapter 1, cruel optimism is a form of positivity that arises from attachments to objects, ideologies, and behaviors that are ultimately harmful, and it leads to forms of “slow death” for the individual and the populations to which she belongs. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 102.

13. Cvetkovich, Depression, 15.

15. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 12. I cluster Cvetkovich and Muñoz together here, but the former places more emphasis on “ordinary form[s] of spiritual practice that I call the utopia of everyday habit,” habits such as bodywork, exercise, craft making, personal writing, and even flossing. Cvetkovich, Depression, 159. While some of these practices are public (for example, producing crafts in and for gallery spaces and fairs), many primarily redound to the individual and are part of an alchemy of “self-transformation.” Ibid., 168. Muñoz’s optimism of the negative, on the other hand, enlists queer artworks and political acts to speculate on the possibility for collective utopianism.

16. Hacking, “Our Neo-Cartesian Bodies in Parts,” 80.

17. Speth, America the Possible, 194.

18. Powers, “What Does Fiction Know?”

19. There has been a “turn to the planet” within globalization and cosmopolitan studies as well as environmental studies. A genealogy of the former strands of cultural criticism includes the work of Masao Miyoshi, Wai Chee Dimock, and Gayatri Spivak, among others. In 2001 Masao plotted this turn in an essay that announced that “literature and literary studies now have one basis and goal: to nurture our common bonds to the planet—to replace the imaginaries of exclusionist familialism, communitarianism, nationhood, ethnic culture, regionalism, ‘globalization,’ or even humanism, with the ideal of planetarianism.” Miyoshi, “Turn to the Planet,” 295. See also Dimock and Buell, Shades of the Planet; and Spivak, Death of a Discipline.

20. For reflections on these debates, see the first two chapters of Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism; Oppermann, “Ecocriticism’s Theoretical Discontents”; and Phillips, The Truth of Ecology. Simon C. Estok and S. K. Robisch revived this debate about whether theory amounts to obscurantism in the pages of ISLE in 2009. Estok, “Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness”; and Robisch, “The Woodshed.” In his rejoinder to theory aversion, Estok urges ecocritics to privilege “ecophobia” as an analytic. I agree with Estok that a major task of ecocriticism lies in “identifying the affective ethics a text produces … [and] having the willingness to listen to, to think about, and to see the values that are written into that work through the representations of nature we imagine, theorize, and produce.” Estok, “Reading Ecophobia,” 76. However, I do not agree that we should privilege fear over all emotions.

21. 350.org targets the fossil fuel economy in order to solve the climate crisis while Speth addresses a wider range of social, economic, and environmental transformations required to usher in a more just political economy. See the list in Speth, America the Possible, 10–11.