Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

Literature Now

by Heather Houser

The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings. As efforts to prevent ecological and bodily injury aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. "Ecosickness fiction" imaginatively rethinks the link between these forms of threat and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. Tracing the development of ecosickness through a compelling archive of contemporary U.S. novels and memoirs, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction establishes that we cannot comprehend environmental and medical dilemmas through data alone and must call on the sometimes surprising emotions that literary metaphors, tropes, and narratives deploy. In chapters on David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, Heather Houser shows how narrative affects such as wonder and disgust organize perception of an endangered world and orient us ethically toward it. The study builds the connective tissue between contemporary literature, ecocriticism, affect studies, and the medical humanities. It also positions ecosickness fiction relative to emergent forms of environmentalism and technoscientific innovations such as regenerative medicine and alternative ecosystems. Houser models an approach to contemporary fiction as a laboratory for affective changes that spark or squelch ethical projects.

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction, Environment

330 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 3, 2014

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The most basic point that Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction makes is that contemporary novels and memoirs deploy affect in narratives of sick bodies to bring readers to environmental consciousness."

Houser is interested in contemporary literary texts that depict ecosickness without turning to a causal model. Houser sees 1970s ecofiction as breaking from previous works. This is because of the "heightened technologization and medicalization of the bodies." She asks, "how do interventions into the very stuff of life make us feel/? And how do those feeligns reconfigure environemtnal and biomedical ethics and politics? What interests me are authors who approach these questiosn without using causality as motivating logic." She suggests that emotion as much if not more than empiricism brings us to awareness and consciousness.

Chapters look at rural memoirs of HIV/AIDS, Infinite Jest , and the writings of Leslie Marmon Silk and Marge Piercy.

[Gretchen Lida · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heather Houser does her homework and takes on a challenge. What is Ecosickness? It is aids, it is cancer, it is disillusionment, it is the fact that some of us are removed from a dialogue about nature. This book is a great critical resource for those looking to write about ecology and its place in the literary Wold.