| Description |
This dissertation examines texts that treat language as geologic, and geology as linguistic. I contend that certain literary works enact geologic processes such as erosion and stratification, and demonstrate how this geologic impulse is central to understanding the ecological imperative in works by Robert Smithson, Ed Dorn, Ishmael Reed, Clark Coolidge, Steve McCaffery, and Jen Bervin. Read collectively, these texts--which range from art criticism to prose fiction to poetry to artist books--model a metamorphic and not a metaphoric engagement with geology. These are not (or not simply) works that employ geologic concepts as metaphors pointing to abstract human truths, but works that seek to embody chthonic movements. Emphasizing formally innovative writing that has not typically been viewed through an ecocritical lens, I argue that these works' use of geologic processes push the limits of expression in order to explore how language operates beyond a narrowly human framework. Furthermore, I locate this inhuman (not to be confused with inhumane) dimension within language itself, raising questions about a literary work's ability to communicate or represent nonhuman realms. The works in this study bridge what Lawrence Buell in The Environmental Imagination called the gap between language and the world of objects. They do so, however, not through conventional representations of nature, but rather by producing textual equivalents of geologic processes. |
