Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Comparative Literature

Advisor

Peter Hitchock

Committee Members

Giancarlo Lombardi

Jerry Carlson

Subject Categories

Comparative Literature | English Language and Literature | Television | Visual Studies

Keywords

Materialism, narratology, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, media studies

Abstract

This dissertation argues that narrators are constructed by their interactions with diegetic space and time in an ecological relationship. This argument draws upon Erin James’s work on econarratology, particularly her book The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives, putting her theories of narrating time and place in dialogue with contemporary “unnatural” narratology as theorized by scholars such as Jan Alber and Brian Richardson. Science fiction (SF) offers a rich complement to these theoretical stances. I also focus much of my dissertation on how narratology works across and is influenced by specific media, featuring literary, audiovisual, and digital media, including novels, films, TV, and video games.

The dissertation begins by laying out the basic relations between space, time, and narration. Here, I recruit the term “chronotopography” from Fernando Silva E Silva. The term refers to a specific fabrication of spatial and temporal logic within a text and becomes the backdrop for my ecological model of the dynamic between spacetime and narrative agent in the following chapters. I briefly contextualize my analysis via the history of SF chronotopography, using the Fallout games and TV show as ways to think with and through chronotopography.

Chapter one focuses on the meaning of futurity in an ecological context, with Fredric Jameson’s work on SF as a starting point, and focusing on Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music, and the 2k Games title Bioshock. The second chapter takes on the construction of narrative subjectivity through practices of labor and commodification. In examining Ridley Scott’s Alien and Raised by Wolves franchises as a battle between the forces of industry versus those of nature, I expand upon the extant scholarship on the films to show that these storyworlds are both menaced by the threat of enclosure by capital, commodification, and weaponization, applying Erica Borg and Amadeo Policano’s logic from their work Mutant Ecologies to this problematic. I end the chapter with an examination of Tarkovsky’s Stalker as a film of inside/outside dynamics which illustrate the way that setting engenders a relationship between labor, life, agency, and terrain.

The following chapter moves from productive to reproductive forces with an analysis of Blade Runner and its sequel, Blade Runner 2049. I demonstrate how narrative time and space facilitate narration by subjects arrayed as goods, making use of the erotic as a foil to rather than a corollary of reproductive practices. This analysis leads me to Kim Bo-Young’s two short stories “On the Origin of Species” and “On the Origin of Species – and What May Have Happened Thereafter,” stories which work together to chart the history of the reengineering of humanity in the image of robots long after the (presumably) first humans rendered the world uninhabitable to organic life. Affective relationships between technology, terrain, and narration are the foundation of the next chapter, which enlists the ideas at the intersection of Marx and Spinoza, mainly through the work of Jason Read on affect. Videodrome, Crimes of the Future, and Ghost in the Shell comprise the texts under examination here, as I argue for the always-technologically-mediated nature of affect in SF texts.

While the scope of my analysis is limited by its own spatial and temporal constraints, I wish to emphasize that these conclusions have important implications across media and genre. As I examine Hao Jingfang’s novella “Folding Beijing,” I offer place itself as narrator. These stories show how we, as a species, trudge forward into the Anthropocene, a process during which we are made by our adaptation to our surroundings over time, and lifetimes link together to form eons and leave our imprints on the geology of Earth.

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