The salted earth

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Publication Type thesis
School or College College of Humanities
Department Environmental Humanities Program
Author Robertson, Eric Joseph
Title The salted earth
Date 2013-12
Description At the outset, my thesis appears fairly straightforward. I'm writing a novel about a single father raising nine children on a dry farm in a small conservative town. Simple enough. But the construction of a work of fiction is far from simple, especially as I write about queer bodies that have negotiated human ecology without recognizable myths and stories to guide their life journeys. So my signpost, the focus of this thesis, is the ecological metaphor. That thing we cannot live without. That thing that always only hints at what might be real. That thing that is always subject to change. This thesis hunts for new ecological metaphors and new ways to describe and figure human bodies. How we talk about a queer body can do strange and marvelous things to the rethinking of ecological metaphor. In these stories there are metaphors old and new, religious and metaphysical, even metaphors pulled from relationships that exist but go unexamined. I don't intend for any one metaphor to stick and replace old ones. I merely explore the possibility of the queer body acting as (here comes the new metaphor) an ecotone-a place of mixing, composting, of radical interdisciplinary engagement. By opening a creative space to the rigors of scientific inquiry and the mysteries of our feral human imagination I hope to create stories couched not in any singular discursive register, but stories seething with uncertainty and a radical openness.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
Subject Ecological metaphor; Nonprocreative; Queer materialism; Queer sublime
Dissertation Institution University of Utah
Dissertation Name Master of Arts
Language eng
Rights Management Copyright © Eric Joseph Robertson 2013
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 1,247,939 bytes
Identifier etd3/id/2627
ARK ark:/87278/s6bz9f6r
Setname ir_etd
ID 196202
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6bz9f6r