Uncovering the Truth of Extraction: Global Environmental Fiction and Nonfiction, 1962–2022

Abstract

This dissertation examines global environmental fiction and nonfiction since the 1960s to assess how writers portray energy and resource extraction, including coal, uranium, oil, and critical minerals. Focusing on the overlaps between fiction and nonfiction genres, I argue that there is a trend in contemporary literature of modern muckraking. Like their Progressive-Era predecessors, these modern muckraking texts engage in a metaphorical extraction of truth and meaning, based on fact and reality. However, they diverge from historical muckraking in their focus on literal extraction and the materiality of the land. In other words, modern muckraking journalism—both fiction and nonfiction—dwells in the “muck” of muckraking. I situate this trend against extractivism, a term in literary studies that evokes extraction as an abstract idea, whether as a commodity or as written stories and truths. While muckraking is a form of extractivism, this dissertation considers the formal ways in which these texts foreground the materiality of real extraction through realism, literary journalism, character, or illustrations. Moreover, I suggest that muckraking texts—with their emphasis on uncovering subjective truth and meaning—have the potential to uncover the truth of real extraction, and ideally, spur readers to make meaningful changes in society. In the first chapter, I focus on realism’s historical influence as fiction that purports to tell the truth and represent reality. The realist novel rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, an era of prolific coal mining, and novels like Ann Pancake’s Strange as this Weather Has Been (2007) and Indian writer Jagadish Mohanty’s Battles of Our Own (1990) continue to embrace realism to depict modern coal extraction. The second chapter pivots to literary journalism (which goes by many different names, including narrative nonfiction, the nonfiction novel, etc.) and how nonfiction writers write about facts and truth in the context of nuclear energy’s effects: waste disposal in John D’Agata’s About a Mountain (2010) and nuclear disaster in Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl (1997). I then continue in the next chapter with an analysis of journalist main characters, searching for the truth amid petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta as portrayed in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010) and in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota as depicted in Jung Yun’s O Beautiful (2021). Last, the dissertation ends with an analysis of subjectivity and visibility in illustrated nonfiction like Lauren Redniss’s Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West (2020), Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), and Richard Van Camp’s “Like A Razor Slash” (2019) to demonstrate how Indigenous land reclamation is necessary to counteract the extractivism of Indigenous livelihoods and stories. Each chapter addresses the process of journalistic and literary uncovering to understand how writers communicate meaning and truth. This dissertation aims to stretch the bounds of what we might routinely conceive of as fiction and nonfiction, while helping us understand extraction’s often harmful toll on humans and the environment.