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Title TRANSGEOGRAPHICAL ECOSENSITIVIETY: A COMPARATIVE ECOCRITICAL STUDY OF PAKISTANI AND AMERICAN FICTION IN ENGLISH

Author(s) Monazza Nazir Makhdoom

Abstract ABSTRACT Thesis Title: TRANSGEOGRAPHICAL ECOSENSITIVITY: A COMPARATIVE ECOCRITICAL STUDY OF PAKISTANI AND AMERICAN FICTION IN ENGLISH This comparative study aims to explore how different cultures understand and represent environment and nature in their respective discourse. Four texts are selected for the study: Moth Smoke, Trespassing, White Noise and A Thousand Acres for an in-depth analysis. Examining the material and discursive areas of environmental exploitation and injustice across different regions, the selected Pakistani and American texts in this study are interpreted in a transgeographical context. It is argued, the difference in perception of environmentalism in different fictions, originate in large-scale political and economic processes that give rise to most social and environmental problems in regions that are in the global south like Pakistan. American environmentalism on the contrary, that is originally founded on deep ecology and nature conservationist paradigm, saw a fundamental shift in the late twentieth century and deviated at a mystifying pace and emerged with a new paradigm with radical environmental criticism of capitalist consumerism and ecological toxic contamination which is manifested in American novels like White Noise and A Thousand Acres. By creating a dialogue between ecocritical and postcolonial theory, the study seeks to address how the selected fictions are interweaved with human and environmental history, thus subtly alluding to ecological and cultural sensibilities and underscore a very different vision of human relationships to the environment in Pakistani and American English fiction. In doing so, the selected texts also foreground that there are significant discrepant political, historical and social features across the variety of environmentalist perspectives. These varying perceptions emphasize a sense of place as a basic prerequisite for environmental awareness. Furthermore, by paying attention to the style, linguistic and visual topographies of the selected texts this comparative study also establishes how environmental degradation manifested as pollution, chemicals toxins, contamination and unbound consumption disrupts the human – ecology, alters the environment, and complicates human and nonlife life forms. I draw upon Lawrence Buell’s notion on “Toxic Discourse” in Moth Smoke and White Noise which are examined to show how enviornmental degradation represent a toxic and fractured world due to consumption and neoliberal capitalism. On the other hand, a planetary and cosmopolitan vision is also explored by focusing on texts like Trespassing and A Thousand Acres which are significant to trace “cultural imagination from a sense of place to a less territorial and more systematic sense of planet” (Hesie 56). Both novels reflect how different communities and individuals negotiate the relationship between what Heise terms as local and global networks of economics and culture while also considering their exposure to risk scenarios. An explication of these various environmental scenarios underscore that the multiple varieties of ecosystems from the global North and the global South in their respective socio-cultural spheres are by no means holistic, utopian or harmonious in any sense, but each, on the contrary, emphasises the possibility of rapidly growing environmental risks affecting the ecology as well those inhabiting that environment. While their similarities are tied together by a thematic unity as manifestations of various environmental visions that communicate a planetary heightened environmental awareness in the contemporary society, their differences accentuate that within each of these competing discourses there exists a fundamental difference that is specific to their historical, cultural and material conditions and require attention when exploring environmentalism in a transgeographical context.

Type Thesis/Dissertation PhD

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2019-05-21

Subject PhD English Literature

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