The measure of our care: The politics of place and animal presence in contemporary North American narrative

Richard Kerridge writes that the present ecological crisis is partly "a failure of narrative" (4). This thesis explores the ways in which a range of contemporary, predominantly Canadian and American authors (with the notable exception of J.M. Coetzee) address this "failure" in their own works. In the spirit of moral philosophical inquiry, the writers I examine question the adequacy of narrative in the context of environmental crisis and the utility of various literary traditions---the autobiography, the bildungsroman, the sentimental animal story---in soliciting the affective and ethical engagement of their readers. I frame close readings of Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, Chip Ward's Canaries on the Rim, Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach, Barbara Gowdy's The White Bone, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, and J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello within a brief historical survey of American ecocriticism, charting its emergence as distinct sub-discipline and identifying the formal and theoretical concerns that inform the two "waves" of scholarship Lawrence Buell anatomizes in The Future of Environmental Criticism. I also present an account of what we might begin to think of as a parallel, rather than cognate, Canadian tradition. My dissertation maps the traditional concerns of "first wave" ecocriticism and the revisionist concerns of "second wave" ecocriticism onto a rough continuum that advances from Williams's and Ward's ecobiographies to Robinson's critique of environmental racism and literary hermeneutics. In the third chapter, which focuses on the biocentric narratives of Gowdy, Martel and Coetzee, I suggest a "third wave" of inquiry, one that applies the deep ecology of a "first wave" approach and the theoretical rigour of a "second wave" approach to the subject of the animal. Throughout the thesis I focus on formal innovation, generic recuperation, and oppositional strategies in the texts I examine. These techniques and the interdisciplinary methodologies they invite suggest dynamic ways of re-conceiving the roles of literature and literary theory in the context of twenty-first-century pressures.

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