Abstract
This thesis attends to the slippages between life and nonlife in Emily Fridlunds 2017 novel History of Wolves. It traces the matter that is granted life or animacy, as well as the matter that is devitalized. Through the protagonist, Linda, the novel investigates the role of both scientific knowledge production and Christian Science in placing arbitrary biological limits on life forms, making some visible and others unseeable and unsayable. The thesis fleshes out the characters’ climate denial as yet another erasure of the animate agents. Ultimately, the thesis asks: if we can expand what is worthy of life, can we, in turn, expand what agents, actors, and matters are deserving of care?
Highlights
When Linda, Paul’s babysitter, identifies rust as a living thing on the littered beer cans, she ruptures a crucial divide: that of the living and the dead
By exploring the transgressive qualities of Linda’s nonhuman relationships in opposition to the disciplining narratives of both science and Christian Science, we can unearth the ecocritical appeal within History of Wolves to see beyond epistemological divisions nonhuman life forms and, perhaps, through this expanded vitality, form living connections
It conditions human subjects to perceive the world in line with the ruling epistemology
Summary
“I started naming things off for him as we went. Trailing arbutus. The discipline of biology assumes a clear division between what is living and what is what is non-life, a division that Linda does not perceive in materials like rust and ice. The hackneyed scientific terms floating around the classroom used to describe the living and the dead do not correlate to Linda’s intimate affiliations; these theories create reality instead of explaining it. Linda makes possible just such a shift for the reader of History of Wolves, opening our eyes to animate interactions hitherto unnoticed While her perceptions are not registered under a normative scientific lens, they track noteworthy changes in the world around her like the cascading fall of a branch, the wumff of ice, and the “iron gusts” of snow. When Linda manumits the nonhuman world from the deadening tyranny of scientific realms of intelligibility, she ushers in the potential of intimacy and unpredictability that subscribers to the scientific paradigm would do well to consider
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