No abstract

This article offers a material ecocritical reading of the work of Charles Olson, arguing that Olson's oeuvre constitutes a critical moment in the evolution of contemporary ecological thought. The article begins by highlighting the revival of interest in midtwentieth-century philosophy of physics texts within 'new materialism', before moving into a comprehensive exploration of the degree to which the same mid-century science writing transformed Olson's literary depictions of the human and the environment. This work exposes the significant parallels between Olson's literary response to quantum ideas and their deployment in contemporary theory, providing valuable historical context to ecocriticism's current 'new materialist' turn.

The book’s concluding chapter begins with an ecocritical reading Gregory Corso’s 1958 poem ‘Bomb’. The conclusion then reflects on the book’s contributions to the fields of Cold War literary criticism and ecocriticism. As part of the book’s re-evaluation of the significance of the Cold War period to contemporary ecocritical debate, this chapter also develops the book’s argument that Rachel Carson’s seminal work Silent Spring (1962) should be viewed as one of a growing number of American texts written after 1945 that present an interdependent, ecological vision of the human’s relationship to its environment.

Chapter One interrogates Paul Bowles’s presentation of the human relationship to Nature in his bestselling novel The Sheltering Sky (1949). In his autobiography Without Stopping (1972), Bowles describes a “secret connection between the world of nature and the consciousness of man” that is activated by the presence of the North African desert landscape. The chapter investigates the prevalence of such interactions between the human mind and the desert landscape across Bowles’s fiction and non-fiction writing, and demonstrates the degree to which Bowles’s exposure to Sufism shaped his literary depictions of an infinite, ecological Nature with the power to influence and annihilate the human. This chapter reads The Sheltering Sky (1949) alongside Bowles’s extensive non-fiction travel writing, in order to expose the influence of Sufism on the novel’s depictions of an infinite and annihilating desert landscape.

Chapter Three begins with analysis of the function of the American West in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The chapter goes on to reveal that Salinger’s literary depictions of Nature are significantly informed by the Americanised translations of Chinese and Japanese philosophical texts that he was studying from as early as 1946. The chapter uncovers the sources of translated Taoism to which Salinger was exposed, revealing that the translators Salinger mentions by name in his literary fiction all markedly foreground the role of Nature in their ‘American versions’ of classical Chinese and Japanese texts. Chapter Three then applies this research in close readings of two of Salinger’s later long stories, ‘Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters’ (1955) and ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ (1959), and offers a new reading of The Catcher in the Rye. These ecocritical readings expose the substantial influence of the ‘American versions’ of Taoist texts that Salinger studied on his literary depictions of an infinite and ecological Nature.