| Description |
My dissertation focuses on an ecocritical evaluation of environmental representation in contemporary comics and graphic novels. Ecocriticism and the graphic narrative share disciplinary similarities; both are hybrid forms that commingle seemingly incommensurable components (literature and the land, text and image), and both continue to evolve in complex and exciting ways. Using the familiar rubric of animal, vegetable, and mineral, my dissertation explores the theoretical underpinnings of ecocriticism's contemporary moment as it is illustrated in the graphic environment. Ecocriticism today is marked by an increased interest in postcolonial theory and by a posthumanist turn that has culminated in various species of speculative realism and new materialist theory. Following an introduction designed to juxtapose the development of ecocriticism with the evolving graphic and narrative conventions of comics and graphic novels, I turn in my first chapter to a postcolonial ecocritical analysis of the graphic novel. Given the confluence of aesthetics and politics in a postcolonial theory, I invoke the work of French theorist Jacques Rancière as a necessary component of my ecocritical analysis of three graphic narratives featuring animal protagonists. My second chapter provides close textual and visual readings of two graphic novels whose vegetable-human hybrid characters provide models for applying Deleuze's theory of the rhizome and Manuel DeLanda's assemblage theory to environmental representation. This chapter introduces key concepts that ground much of new materialism and serves as a bridge to my third chapter. Here, I weave together the threads of feminist materialism and object-oriented ontology in an ecocritical reading of three graphic novels that consider things from a thing's point of view. My conclusion shifts forward to an ecocritical reading of two graphic novels that provide global and local perspectives on the critical issues concerning environmental writers and theorists today, the ecological, social, and economic consequences of hyperobjects like global climate change and global financial collapse. Graphic narratives provide a uniquely effective representational medium for locating the contemporary environmental imagination and for illustrating the theoretical complexities beneath its surface. I argue that there is much work to be done at the confluence of image and text in the graphic environment. |
