Reading risk: collisions of crisis in contemporary American literature

Thesis

This thesis examines representations of risk in contemporary American literature, joining a growing body of critical attention to risk and its relevance to literary studies. Framing risk as a matter of perception and therefore a matter of reading, this project explores how the interlocking structure of contemporary crisis both reflects and demands new critical approaches. This inquiry therefore undertakes a comparative study of how different forms and genres articulate and account for risk.

Risk is an analytical tool capacious enough to read across the range, scale, and complexity of contemporary crisis. To focus this expansive archive, this project is grounded at the intersection of two contemporary crises that anchor the modern “risk society”: terrorism and environmental destruction (Beck, Risk Society 9). These two categories of risk have also shaped American literary studies’ engagement with crisis over the last two decades, primarily through the subdisciplines of post- 9/11 analysis and ecocriticism. Building connectivity between these bifurcated discourses, this project accounts for risk in contemporary American literature inductively through a study of nine texts. Chapter One explores risk’s circulation through the networks of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007). Chapter Two investigates rupture and continuity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011). Chapter Three considers contradictory constructions of risk’s universality and particularity in Gayle Brandeis’s Self Storage (2007), Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days (2005), and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014). Chapter Four, through the case studies of Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun (2009) and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary (2017 [2015]), explores the tension between risk as exceptional and risk as routine.

Providing a corrective to what we might call “single-issue criticism,” this thesis will demonstrate how contemporary literature is already teaching us how to read across risk by making the convergences of crisis visible and offering immanent criticism of the ways risk is plotted and conceptualized.

Authors: Waltcher, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-jne6azbbg
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Post-9/11 Literature; Ecocriticism; Contemporary American Literature; Risk
• Subjects: Literature; Literary Studies