Nathan Wolff
Tufts University
Nathan Wolff is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University, where he teaches nineteenth-century American literature. His work has appeared in the journals English Literary History, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. He is currently completing a book project titled Fits of Reason: Political Emotion in the Gilded Age.
Hubris is an unlikely candidate for an Environmental Humanities (EH) keyword. Central to classical tragedy, self-defeating confidence is much older than contemporary ecocriticism. As my paper would argue, however, "hubris" has... [ view full abstract ]
Hubris is an unlikely candidate for an Environmental Humanities (EH) keyword. Central to classical tragedy, self-defeating confidence is much older than contemporary ecocriticism. As my paper would argue, however, "hubris" has been revitalized as an essential, if sometimes problematic, concept in the related fields of EH, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism.
Jane Bennett, for example, insists we attend to the vitality of matter as a counter to "instrumentalized matter" that "feeds human hubris" (Vibrant Matter, ix). Timothy Morton, however, notes that theorists of the “Anthropocene" are sometimes charged with hubris for overstating humanity's power to impact the globe (Dark Ecology, 21). A contemporary critical focus on humanity’s hubris provides further tension at a moment when many people labor under conditions of economic and environmental instability. While too much confidence fuels reckless development, focusing on “hubris” may divert attention from the lives of the new “precariat,” a class position defined by radically diminished confidence.
My paper would link these issues to C19 texts, considered progenitors to modern environmental literature, that rely on a hubristic structure. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ill-fated scientists in “The Birth-Mark” and “Rapaccini’s Daughter,” for example, tinker with nature without regard for the consequences. In Walden, Thoreau uses the figure of the chiasmus to reject industrial hubris while foregrounding widespread vulnerability: “we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” My paper would ask seminar participants to consider if or how the U.S. nineteenth century offers ways to (re)think hubris as a powerful analytic rubric within EH.
