| This thesis addresses the paradox within American attitudes toward the land as illustrated in two twentieth-century novels, William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (1942) and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997). In reading these novels, although Go Down, Moses was written within the time period known as modernism and Underworld was written within postmodernism, I follow the recent developments in ecocriticism to show how both texts illustrate our inextricable ties to the land. I show that these novels, read through the lens of this criticism, can help close the gap between the human and the land, between our rhetoric about the land and our actual treatment of it, between the reality that the "fruited plain" sustains us as a culture and the fact that we risk ravaging that "fruited plain" until it becomes barren. |
