Throughout my experience in Bryn Mawr English courses, I have found myself most drawn to and impacted by theory, meaning that deciding on a primary text I am willing to spend the next year with has been a challenge. Accordingly, my approach thus far to selecting a text has involved considering its potential to be explored along specific analytical pathways. First and foremost, I plan for this project to be environmentalist in nature, because I have been deeply interested in ecocritical and, in particular, ecofeminist writings since my first-year Emily Balch Seminar (Fantastic Fiction and the Environment). This interest evolved into the question that shaped my final dossier of work for Methods: what kinds of relationships do different works of contemporary environmental literature have to futurity? Obviously, this is far too broad a query to tackle within the scope of the senior essay, but it remains a guiding question for me; I intend for my final, much more focused, argument to be understood as a derivative of it.
In the aforementioned project, utopia theory emerged as a strong critical ligament, being as it is often entangled with futurity in literature. I plan to continue my application of this framework in an environmental context; to that end, I will likely refer to Jameson’s “The Politics of Utopia” (which was heavily informative for me at the time). Since finishing that project, I have also discovered José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, which introduced a fascinating and deeply relevant queer dimension to the discourse - Muñoz is the primary theorist I have in mind while conceiving my senior essay. In Cruising Utopia, he refers to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, particularly her theory of paranoid and reparative reading; encountering this cros sover felt incredibly significant, given that this methodology of Sedgwick’s had founded the entirety of my Methods project. Her work was a turning point in my relationship to environmental literature in terms of opening my mind to its different registers; that being said, I am not yet sure to what extent it will be incorporated in my thesis.
So what contemporary text(s) leaves itself open for investigation into this triangulation of futurity, environment, and queerness? At this point, I have (tentatively) narrowed it down to two options: River Solomon’s "St. Juju" (a short story) and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (a novel), both introduced to me by Prof. Harford Vargas’s Speculative Futures course. Although quite different texts, they are nonwhite futurist narratives that center the experiences of queer characters while interrogating the human-environment relationship. I found that they elicited similar questions: how does this text conceive of futurity? What roles do hope and/or guilt play? Is this speculative landscape a utopia? A dystopia? What kind? In what ways is it queered? Is the text a call to action, and if so, is it effective? More to come...