Disaster Culture in the Age of Muir: Environmental Threat and American Consciousness

Vincent M. Basso University of New Mexico "Disaster Culture in the Age of Muir: Environmental Threat and American Consciousness" This presentation investigates disaster culture and its development in the Gilded Age United... [ view full abstract ]

Vincent M. Basso 

University of New Mexico 

"Disaster Culture in the Age of Muir: Environmental Threat and American Consciousness" 

This presentation investigates disaster culture and its development in the Gilded Age United States. My work focuses on American literary naturalism and its uses of natural disaster and environmental threat and I consider the ways that writers like Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Jack London transposed social anxieties onto the environment as a way to aestheticize environment and its hazards. Archival research into the natural disasters that revolve throughout Frank Norris’ Vandover and the Brute, in particular, reveal a variety of rhetorical techniques that emphasized sentiment and sensation to coordinate a national population. I distinguish three central environmental disasters in Norris’ Vandover that express the prevalence of a culture in which disaster is a presence anticipated in daily life. Central to this presentation is my analysis of local and national reportage on California’s Lone Pine Earthquake of 1872, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the sinking of the S.S. Colima in 1895, all of which evidence disaster’s power and spectacle. My work uncovers an array of practices that range from the attribution of earthquakes to technological advancement to the racial conceits that privilege White lives over non-White victims and the positioning of multiple unrelated crises near enough on the page so as to produce news as a sort of collage of threat. I argue centrally that the press approached disaster in ways that often reified American nationalism while positioning its readers into states of heightened anxiety that constituted an economy of voyeurism that connected literary markets throughout the United States. Despite the environmentalism of Muir and even Roosevelt, such work animated the national population and produced a consciousness about disaster and environment as entertainments whose intelligibility required the containment and mastery of nature at all costs.