From Cheechako to Koviashuvik and Shahóon: Wilderness and the Alaskan Sublime in Ken Ilgunas’s Walden on Wheels and Ernestine Hayes’s Blonde Indian

As “America's last frontier”, Alaska provides an opportunity to revisit the pioneer past in a challenging and awe-inspiring landscape (Nash 2014). While the Alaskan nature illustrates the inhospitable and terrifying features of the Burkean sublime, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and air traffic exemplify the presence of technology in a state that has been perceived as “pure” or “untrammelled”, a view associated with the natural sublime. For these reasons, contemporary U.S. memoirs including descriptions of Alaska constitute suitable case studies for analyzing the rhetorical affordances and limits of the sublime for figuring (non-)human materiality and for questioning the nature/culture divide. While the Anthropocene and the sublime produce senses of excess, overwhelm, and disorientation (Purdy 2015), the memoir, as human-centered and referring to an “extra-textual reality” (Couser 2011), is a privileged genre to investigate the Anthropocene sublime and these related affects. Through a rhetorical and narratological—mainly informed by recent insights from econarratology, which study the place and function of materiality and (non-)human agency in literary texts while rhetorically alerting readers to an ethics of care for (non-)human otherness (James and Morel 2020)—analysis of Ken Ilgunas's Walden on Wheels (2013) and Ernestine Hayes's Blonde Indian (2006) as well as of their uses of the notions of koviashuvik and shahóon, this paper will argue that the natural sublime and the American concept of wilderness are still problematic and divisive, and will present the “haptic sublime” (McNee 2016) and “stuplime” (Ngai 2005) as contributing to imagining a more participative and “ecological sublime” (Hitt 1999).