Natural biographies: Ecology and identity in contemporary American autobiography

This dissertation responds to the emergence of ecologically oriented American autobiography. I refer to this developing literature as natural biography and contend that it offers significantly new perspectives on the self. By definition, the study of autobiography has long assumed the centrality of the human individual. This focus on writing one's own life rests on two key assumptions: first, that autobiography narrates the development of a singular subjectivity; second, that the individual lives recorded in autobiography function representatively within a democratic worldview. Both of these assumptions deserve closer scrutiny, and in the last half century we have witnessed a host of challenges to the narrative trajectories and subjective models of traditional autobiography. Resistant theories of autobiography---especially those forwarded by feminist and cultural studies critics---have broadened our awareness of autobiographical forms and exposed the narrow limitations of a Euro-American model of universal personhood. Nonetheless, autobiography studies remain focused on representations of human selves within human cultures, paying scant attention to the interactions of human beings in a more-than-human world.;In arguing for natural biography, I employ an ecocritical approach to address what I see as an impasse in the field; to move forward, we must reevaluate our assumptions about autobiographical writing and the autobiographical subject. In my study of three contemporary writers of the western United States, William Kittredge, Terry Tempest Williams, and Mary Clearman Blew, I outline the development of natural biography as a sub-genre explicitly concerned with the links between environment and identity. Whereas traditional autobiography retrospectively narrates the individual's separation from his surroundings, natural biography traces the connections between self and place and interrogates them in service of sustainable models of identity and inhabitation. The result is a responsible literature of the self embedded in history, community, and geography. I illustrate the performance of natural biography as I evaluate each writer's innovations in response to the specific challenges to self-narration posed by regional cultures, communal attitudes, and environmental concerns. Additionally, I chart a developmental trajectory across these authors, describing a genealogy that confronts generic and regional constraints as a precursor to creating alternative, ecologically sound self-narratives.