American Anthropocene Sublimes: Rhetorics and Narrations of Self and Environment in the Contemporary U.S. Ecobiographical Memoir

This PhD dissertation explores the affordances and limits of the sublime for figuring modes of materiality and non/human agency in contemporary American ecobiographical memoirs. Because the sublime has a particularly contested literary and cultural history in the United States, where the ‘American sublime’ has been conflated with problematic notions such as the wilderness and the frontier, and technology, the five chapters of this dissertation offer ecocritical and rhetorical-narratological analyses of five environments and/or activities (mountains/mountaineering, hunting, agriculture, atomic power, and oil extraction) and related so-called ‘American Anthropocene sublimes’ (mountain, animal, agricultural, nuclear, and petroleum sublimes). Situated at the intersection of the fields of American literary studies, environmental humanities, autobiography studies, and rhetorical-narratology, it develops, in doing so, an updated multifaceted understanding of the (American) sublime in the Anthropocene. More specifically, by systematically drawing on recent reconceptualizations of the sublime (e.g., the ‘haptic sublime’ and the ‘toxic sublime’) and confronting these notions with the sublimes considered in each chapter as well as contiguous categories (e.g., the ‘stuplime’ and the ‘eerie’) in its comparative textual analysis, this dissertation articulates the sublime as a key procedure for representing and apprehending non/human agency and Anthropocene entanglements.