Presenter(s): Maxfield Lydum − English
Faculty Mentor(s): Brian Gazaille
Oral Session 3O
Research Area: Humanities
Object-oriented ontology (OOO), a development that has become particularly useful in ecological philosophy, seeks to understand the way in which objects exist and act upon one another. OOO views existence as lying in an irreducible rift between the appearance and essence of objects. Timothy Morton has recently formulated this theory of causality into a philosophy of ecological awareness in the Anthropocene. Drawing from Morton’s recent books Realist Magic (Open Humanities 2013), Dark Ecology (Columbia 2016), and Humankind (Verso 2017), I attempt to unravel the ontological presuppositions that have guided certain trends in the development of western prose writing. Chief among these presuppositions is a view of objects as subservient to the personal, economic, and literary interests of humans, an ontological hierarchy that Morton argues is the greatest barrier to ecological awareness. Tracing a line from the Icelandic family saga tradition into the works of Herman Melville and Ken Kesey, I argue for the long prose form as an environment of ecological attunement, a narrative arena in which objects can exist in the spectral interplay of appearance and essence. By analyzing these seemingly disparate occasions of prose writing under the interpretive lens of OOO, we begin to understand the way in which the existence of objects in the narrative sphere allows for a possible future of ecological awareness.