| 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. |
