Goodbye to all that: Haunted subjects and environmental afffect in Joan Didion and Wallace Stegner

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Title Goodbye to all that: Haunted subjects and environmental afffect in Joan Didion and Wallace Stegner
Publication Type thesis
School or College College of Humanities
Department Environmental Humanities Program
Author Breckenridge, Zak
Date 2019
Description This thesis tests new materialist reading practices on Wallace Stegner's and Joan Didion's novels of the 1960s and the 1970s. Through a focus on interrupted agency it furthers the synthesis of new materialist and poststructuralist reading practices. It regards these novels as primarily about Stegner's and Didion's fears. Both authors worried that the cultural and narrative assumptions that had underwritten American history and identity were unraveling. They find the past, the future, and the environment unsettling and threatening. They struggle to stabilize subjectivity amid histories and environments that resist coherent narrativization. The thesis uses the language of haunting to describe agencies that resist coherent narrativization. Didion and Stegner dramatize a form of subjectivity that is shaped by discourse, affect, and material surroundings. They struggle to narrate, and therefore they illuminate, the uncanny force of environmental agency and the uncanny agency of human associations.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Dissertation Name Master of Arts
Language eng
Rights Management (c) Zak Breckenridge
Format application/pdf
Format Medium application/pdf
ARK ark:/87278/s6rz5cf8
Setname ir_etd
ID 1709582
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6rz5cf8
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