Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This book-length paper, part of a book-length project, will focus primarily on the concerns in American literature toward the environment and landscape of the United States over the course of three centuries. Tentatively titled Opaque Eyeball: Environmental Destruction in American Literature, the book will be divided into four sections, comprising the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Each chapter or section will focus on the prime acts of environmental destruction of that particular century: the clearing of forests and the destruction of Native American nations in the eighteenth century through an analysis of James Fenimore Cooper’s, The Leatherstocking Tales; the Gold Rush and Manifest Destiny of the nineteenth century through an analysis of the short stories of Bret Harte; the Dust Bowl and the man-made destruction of the soil of the American midwest in the twentieth century through an analysis of John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath; and, in the twenty-first century, the environmental destruction caused by the rise of urban sprawl through the dehumanized landscape of northern New Jersey in The Sopranos. I conclude with an analysis of T.C. Boyle’s novel, A Friend of the Earth. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on the Gold Rush, the short stories of Bret Harte and the Great Flood of 1862, and how this natural disaster was exasperated by hydraulic mining, and inspired Harte to write his stories “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” “Notes by Flood and Field,” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp.”