| This paper deconstructs the situation of the human body and other aspects of the bios in Love in the Time of Cholera and The Jungle. I argue that political and ethical ideologies and systems serve to elevate the lives of a powerful sovereign at the expense of others who are segregated and oppressed within the city limits of the novels' urban environments based on race, class, and perceived divisions of “blood.” This results in a biopolis , a place shaped by relationships among life, power, and the bios that are ultimately thanatopolitical. In order to make ecocriticism more practically applicable, I argue that these biopolei become examples for urban spaces that promote the same unjust bioethical and biopolitical systems and ideologies, thereby expanding on traditional ecocritical assumptions about theory, praxis, nature, environmental justice, and bioethics while also providing a background for material justice in our nation's cities. |
