"Like Lice on Mammoths' Hides": Frank Norris and the Styling of Anthropocenic Scale
Clint Williamson
University of Pennsylvania
Clint Williamson is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in 19th Century American literature. His dissertation, Nebulous Figures: A Cultural History of an American Undercommons, looks at the ways in which a so-called lumpenproletariat crafted refusals to work as strategies for restaging value in the latter half of the 19th Century. Examining a wide range genres, this project proposes that those living on the margins of wage labor possessed vibrant and complex social networks that in their very resistance to work under capitalism exposed new ways of modelling potential worlds absent its violent drudgery.
Abstract
Clint Williamson University of Pennsylvania "“Like Lice on Mammoths’ Hides”: Frank Norris and the Styling of Anthropocenic Scale" After the titular character in Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague has killed his... [ view full abstract ]
Clint Williamson
University of Pennsylvania
"“Like Lice on Mammoths’ Hides”: Frank Norris and the Styling of Anthropocenic Scale"
After the titular character in Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague has killed his wife and taken off with her gold coins, the narrative abruptly shifts to the description of an American Western landscape as “a vast unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch, savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent to man.” The invocation of this geological timescale, one seemingly concurrent with the present, exists as a means for Norris to extend this metaphor into the portrayal of the technics of gold mining and the collective human impact upon the visible landscape in tones lamenting its futility and celebrating its audacity. This paper examines similar moments of massive scaling up in McTeague and the two novels comprising Norris’s The Epic of the Wheat and asks why they mark such drastic stylistic departures within his prose, moving away from a detail ridden everyday towards what Jennifer Fleissner has dismissively called an invocation to “mystical solace” in the ongoingness of the natural world. I argue that these passages not only demonstrate Norris’s attempts at portraying a deeply interconnected capitalist world-system in unpredictable flux but also mark this world-system’s irrevocable incongruence with an environment in perpetual resistance to its ordering mechanisms: mining practices unable to dislodge a prior geologic time, agricultural seasons defying to synch up with corporate schedules, and hectic trading pits scrambling to speculate on what the future climate may look like. At stake in these tensions are the ways in which narrative prose at the fin de siècle strains to simultaneously capture a global struggle between labor and capital as well as an environmental system increasingly affected by and dictating the terms of this contestation.
Authors
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Clint Williamson
(University of Pennsylvania)
Topic Area
Individual paper
Session
P102 » Eco-Temporalities (10:45 - Sunday, 25th March, Enchantment F)
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