Reading Aridity in Western American Literature

In literary and cinematic representations, deserts often betoken collapse and dystopia.Reading Aridity in Western American Literatureoffers readings of literature set in the American Southwest from ecocritical and new materialist perspectives. This book explores the diverse epistemologies, histories, relationships, futures, and possibilities that emerge from the representation of American deserts in fiction, film, and literary art, and traces the social, cultural, economic, and biotic narratives that foreground deserts, prompting us to reconsider new, provocative modes of human/nonhuman engagement in arid ecogeographies.

Jada Ach is a lecturer for the leadership and integrative studies program at Arizona State University.

Gary Reger is Hobart professor of classical languages at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword: Desertification byTom Lynch

Introduction:The Dry Time byJada Ach and Gary Reger

Part I: Eco-Identities and Environmental Belonging in Arid America

Chapter 1: Imagined Deserts, Planned Communities, and Escape Pods in the American WestbyAmy T. Hamilton

Chapter 2: Aridity, Individualism, and Paradox in Elmer KeltonsThe Time it Never Rained byQuinn Grover

Chapter 3:Desert Haunting: A Gothic Reading of Arturo IslasThe Rain God byCordelia Barrera

Chapter 4: Imagining the Southwest in Willa Cathers Frontier Novels: Settler Colonialism inThe Song of the Lark,The Professors House, andDeath Comes for the Archbishop byZachary R. Hernandez

Part II: Desert Remains: Roads, Dams, and Discarded Pianos

Chapter 5: Desert Roads, Construction Men, and Infrastructural Impulses in Willa CathersThe Professors House by Jada Ach

Chapter 6:It was the river: Indigenous Anti-Dam Literature of the Great American Desert byHolly Jean Richard and Paul Formisano

Chapter 7:The Desert as Dumping Ground in Popular Imagination byJennifer Dawes

Part III: Envisioning the Desert from Outside the West

Chapter 8: Trinitite, Turquoise, and Rattlesnakes: Envisioning the (De)Nuclearized Desert in the Works of Leslie Marmon Silko and Kyoko Hayashi byKyoko Matsunaga

Chapter 9: Color, Place, and Memory in SilkosGardens in the Dunes byCelina Osuna

Chapter 10: French Travelers in the Arid Southwest byGary Reger

Conclusion: Desert Dwelling byRon Broglio

About the Contributors

Index