The Personal and the Planetary: Essaying the Ecological 

This dissertation examines the presentation of self in the literary genre of the personal essay with environmental themes. How does a personal essay communicate a sense of self? Is that sense of self, which often defaults to the Western liberal sense of “individual,” at odds with an ecological consciousness? What is its relation to others, both human and non-human? How does it reinforce or challenge normative liberal identity categories like race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, and nationality? What material energies (as fossil fuels or human labor) sustain that sense of self? What would it mean to read ecologically, what might an ecological essay accomplish, and might this shift how we narrate ourselves?

The introduction traces the simultaneous emergence of the genre in Early Modern Europe with liberal humanism and science—all foundational to an essay of the thinking self. Then, I contextualize the financial restructuring of the 1970s—the re-alignment of currency from gold to oil as well as American imperialism in the Middle East—and the discourse around how this neoliberalization affected an American sense of self centuries later, analyzing Joan Didion’s 1990 essay “Sentimental Journeys.”

Chapter 1, “Mediating Blackness in American Wilderness Nonfiction,” critiques the commonplace (and erroneous) assumption that environmental themes do not feature prominently in essays by Black Americans. First, I amplify existing contemporary Black American wilderness literature that is under-appreciated: Eddy L. Harris’s Mississippi Solo and Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (Book). Second, I explore whether definitions of “personal” and “environmental” might restrict the mode of thinking to so narrow a sense that it implicitly codes as white and middle-class, thus excluding wilder takes on ecology.

Chapter 2, “Essaying a Queer Ecology of Bodies,” delights in nonfiction accounts of public cruising, queer orgies, and the transcorporeality of bodies to think through “queer ecology” and its relation to the personal essay. Three texts are central: David Wojnarowicz’s 1991 Close to the Knives: a Memoir of Disintegration, Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, and Marlon Riggs’s Black Is…Black Ain’t. I connect themes of environmental destruction, extractive economies, queer identity, and public infrastructure.

Chapter 3, “The State of the Essay: Land, Personhood, and Orality” looks at texts that imagine a radically altered sense of self in narrating an experience with US land: Eileen Myles’s “The End of New England”; Leslie Marmon Silko’s Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit and Sacred Water; and Linda Hogan’s Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World. Central to all are a critique of nationalism, US imperialism, and how these gargantuan forces manifest at the scale of the writer’s body while simultaneously grappling with state-sanctioned violence across vaster scales of time and place.

Keywords: environmental humanities, personal essay, nonfiction, self, bodies, liberal modernity, neoliberalism, ecological consciousness, cosmopolitan, David Wojnarowicz, Jamaica Kincaid, Joan Didion, urban ecology, Samuel R. Delany, Leslie Marmon Silko, Eileen Myles, Eddy L. Harris