Date of Award
8-1-2022
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D. in English
First Advisor
Judson Watson
Second Advisor
Leigh Anne Duck
Third Advisor
Karen Raber
School
University of Mississippi
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
This dissertation examines the relationship between southern flood narratives and the epistemological changes wrought by the Anthropocene epoch in the past hundred years. It participates in the turns toward ecocriticism and environmental justice within 21st-century southern studies, situating the US South as a testing ground for ecosystem epistemologies shaped by overabundant water. An expansion of Steve Mentz’s call for a blue humanities that shifts focus from land to sea, Bland Treacherous Water explores what happens to Anthropocene subjects’ ways of knowing their environments when waterways inundate the land itself. By investigating works by William Faulkner, James Dickey, Cormac McCarthy, Marilou Awiakta, Jesmyn Ward, and Michael Farris Smith, this project uncovers the instability and disruption of environmental conditions and thought in the Anthropocene, marking floods as a vector through which those instabilities manifest. It looks to both the missteps of those who fail to recognize this disruption (often from dominant order groups, such as white men) and the cognitive strengths of more successful subjects (often from marginalized groups, especially women of color, and often ones who are pregnant) to model the epistemological changes both engendered and necessitated by the diluvial Anthropocene. Ultimately, Bland Treacherous Water suggests that in a world where floods are becoming increasingly frequent and severe, the epistemologies most suited to the conditions of contemporary climate change are those that release independent stability (and even sustainability) in favor of a precarious buoyancy maintained by communities that create kinship across boundaries of self, family, race, species, and geography.
Recommended Citation
Loomis, Sara Stephens, "Bland Treacherous Water: Diluvial Epistemologies in Flood Narratives of the US South Since 1927" (2022). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2382.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/2382