Reading Aridity in Western American Literature: (Ecocritical Theory and Practice)

In literary and cinematic representations, deserts often betoken collapse and dystopia. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offers readings of literature set in the American Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. This book explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art, and traces the social, cultural, economic, and biotic narratives that foreground deserts, prompting us to reconsider new, provocative modes of human/nonhuman engagement in arid ecogeographies.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgments Foreword: Desertification by Tom Lynch Introduction: The Dry Time by Jada Ach and Gary Reger Part I: Eco-Identities and Environmental Belonging in Arid America Chapter 1: Imagined Deserts, Planned Communities, and Escape Pods in the American West by Amy T. Hamilton Chapter 2: Aridity, Individualism, and Paradox in Elmer Kelton's The Time it Never Rained by Quinn Grover Chapter 3: Desert Haunting: A Gothic Reading of Arturo Islas' The Rain God by Cordelia Barrera Chapter 4: Imagining the Southwest in Willa Cather's Frontier Novels: Settler Colonialism in The Song of the Lark, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop by Zachary R. Hernandez Part II: Desert Remains: Roads, Dams, and Discarded Pianos Chapter 5: Desert Roads, “Construction Men,” and Infrastructural Impulses in Willa Cather's The Professor's House by Jada Ach Chapter 6: “It was the river”: Indigenous Anti-Dam Literature of the Great American Desert by Holly Jean Richard and Paul Formisano Chapte

About the Author :
Jada Ach is a lecturer for the leadership and integrative studies program at Arizona State University. Gary Reger is Hobart professor of classical languages at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Review :
Rich, varied, and deeply engaged, this volume does urgent and exciting work, illuminating the desert West’s cultural and ecological complexity, revealing the environmental costs of its colonization and settlement, and offering creative strategies for promoting environmental awareness. An essential contribution to the fields of Western American and ecocritical literary studies. ‘Reading aridity,’ in this impressive volume, means reading desert-related texts to improve our understanding and appreciation of the cultural and ecological dimensions of the dry regions of the American West, demonstrating how careful attention to desert texts and desert ecologies brings this pulsating life into meaningful focus. This timely and important book grabs us by the shoulders and turns our faces toward aridity and toward desert landscapes in the American West that are ancient, richly diverse ecosystems. Sharply written and beautifully edited, this book is a haunting, illuminating look at how we live with and write about landscapes that are the opposite of the color green. Reading Aridity in Western American Literature offers multiple new ways of thinking about deserts and our responsibilities to them. And this fine, well-written collection is a pleasure for anyone to read. Ach and Reger's work is well written and thought provoking, with strong theoretical support. The multifaceted desert captures the imagination and follows everyone throughout their lives, "remind[ing] us continually of our human-ness even while inviting us to be a part of a larger-than-human world" (275). The fact that scholars and writers alike have so much to say about a sup­posedly empty and barren landscape counteracts stereotypes, thus making deserts and their interrelated elements one of the most fruitful avenues of exploration, now and in the future.