Please join us for Tara C. Kennette's doctoral defense titled Reciprocal Relations: Women and the Environment in American Regionalist Writing.

Committee: James Salazar (Chair), Laura Levitt, Katherine Henry, Carissa Harris, Hilary Iris Lowe

Abstract:

Authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter, Zitkala-Ša, and Mary Austin all wrote within the genre of American regionalism. They produced texts in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century that feature relationships between person and place unique to that genre. My research examines these relationships and the ways that regionalist authors utilized them as a means of conceptualizing novel frameworks of environmental-human connection. Within these relationships, female characters forge connections with nonhuman life that exhibit reciprocal influence, mutual benefit, and the refutation of hierarchies that privilege the human party over the nonhuman. Landscapes and their nonhuman inhabitants are as active of characters in these narratives as the women they connect with. I closely inspect the rhetorical strategies regionalist authors used to deploy these representations. Additionally, I consider regionalism’s potential effectiveness in shifting readers’ perspectives away from dominant patriarchal and anthropocentric narratives of the time. Regionalism offers a voice for marginalized characters, both human and nonhuman. Studying regionalism thus contributes to a fuller understanding of American national identity as defined by the literary works that the nation produces. My work highlights regionalist authors’ use of human-nonhuman contact and environmental focus to present an alternative to conventional narratives that frequently silence or enact violence against those in marginalized subject positions.

Please contact the Department Coordinator, James O'Brien (james.t.obrien@temple.edu), for the meeting link.