Local Americanists: Gretchen Murphy on "Machines in the Wilderness: Ecology and Emotions in Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built"
Local Americanists: Gretchen Murphy on "Machines in the Wilderness: Ecology and Emotions in Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built"
The Local Americanists Works in Progress Series hosts Gretchen Murphy, University of Texas, Austin. We will meet to discuss her pre-circulated essay, which is entitled, “Machines in the Wilderness: Ecology and Emotions in Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built.” Prof. Murphy offers a precis of her essay: This essay examines the influence of conservation biologist E.O. Wilson’s thought on A Psalm for the Wild-Built (2021) by Becky Chambers in order to better position the award-winning science fiction novella in contemporary environmental and posthumanist thought. Doing so complicates readers’ conclusions that Chambers dissolves binary oppositions between human and non-human; instead, the essay argues that Chambers mediates that binary to preserve a special status for humanity, one that is both authorized to steward a totalized planetary system and circumscribed by an ecology of affect adapted from Wilson. The novella’s treatment of non-binary gender identity, part of an approach that Chambers called “ambient queerness,” highlights the narrative’s strategic preservation of what William Cronon has called the wilderness dualism.
Gretchen Murphy is the Sue Goldston Lebermann Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of New England Women Writers, Secularity, and the Federalist Politics of Church and State (Oxford UP, 2021); Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line (NYUP 2010); and Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (Duke UP 2005). She is currently working on book about American speculative fiction, gender identity, and the post-apocalyptic utopia.
If you'd like to attend, please email either Bob Levine (rlevine@umd.edu) or Edlie Wong (edlie@umd.edu) for the Zoom link and writing sample.