Agency, Identity and the Constitution of the Ecological Subject in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom

Temko, Christine
(2013) ASLE-UKI 2013: Ecological Encounters: Agency, Identity, Interactions — Location: University of Surrey (Guildford) (29.August.2013)

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  • Temko, ChristineUCLouvain
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Abstract
Starting from critical analyses of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), this paper shall focus on material ecocriticism’s “search for […] connections between matter and agency on the one side, and the intertwining of bodies, natures and meanings [social, political, cultural, and symbolic] on the other side” . These authors present highly contrasting views of the ecological subject, how it is constituted, and its degree of agency within the environmental struggle: Walter Berglund is a hardcore conservationist and partisan of the ‘triple bottom-line’ stricken with both personal and professional hopelessness as he strives to preserve functional bird habitats within compartmentalized suburban landscapes, whereas the more aggressive Nick Shay appears obsessed with garbage and landfills precisely for their ugly aspects - as places where all deeds and discourses ultimately come to shed and shit their material effects. While Underworld - much like Gay Hawkins in her study Ethics of Waste - is concerned with how streamlining and the general regulation of overflowing refuse matter through infrastructure and sociopolitical discourses can have strong trickle-down effects on the constitution of the subject, Freedom centers on links between personal identity, filiation and sociopolitical affiliation, thus showing that the constitution of these discourses themselves can often be traced back to (often agonal) dynamics of individuation within familial and social groups. In this sense, both authors examine interrelations between material-discursive configurations and ecological identity, be it through “bottom-up” or “top-down” phenomena. Therefore, the choice of novels aims at establishing a comprehensive overview of the interplay between personal identity and various types of discourse seen as actants, their specificities emerging through intra-action of different levels of experience.
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Temko, C. (2013). Agency, Identity and the Constitution of the Ecological Subject in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. ASLE-UKI 2013: Ecological Encounters: Agency, Identity, Interactions, University of Surrey (Guildford). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/191011