The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual
impact of environmental crises on human beings. As efforts to prevent
ecological and bodily injury aligned, a new literature of sickness
emerged. "Ecosickness fiction" imaginatively rethinks the link between
these forms of threat and the sick body to bring readers to
environmental consciousness.
Tracing the development of ecosickness through a compelling archive of
contemporary U.S. novels and memoirs, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S.
Fiction establishes that we cannot comprehend environmental and medical
dilemmas through data alone and must call on the sometimes surprising
emotions that literary metaphors, tropes, and narratives deploy. In
chapters on David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko,
Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, Heather Houser
shows how narrative affects such as wonder and disgust organize
perception of an endangered world and orient us ethically toward it.
The study builds the connective tissue between contemporary literature,
ecocriticism, affect studies, and the medical humanities. It also
positions ecosickness fiction relative to emergent forms of
environmentalism and technoscientific innovations such as regenerative
medicine and alternative ecosystems. Houser models an approach to
contemporary fiction as a laboratory for affective changes that spark or
squelch ethical projects.
