Second natures [electronic resource] : media, masculinity and the natural world in twentieth-century American literature and film /

by Hamming, Jeanne E.

Second Natures: Media, Masculinity and the Natural World in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Film Jeanne E. Hamming This multidisciplinary dissertation examines the cultural anxieties associated with masculine identity in relation to both technology and nature in key literary texts and contemporary films of the twentieth-century: Ray Bradbury's " The Veldt " and The Martian Chronicles, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, James Dickey's Deliverance, Don DeLillo's White Noise, Fight Club, American Psycho, Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and Dark City. Exploring the theoretical intersections of technoculture, ecocriticism, and gender studies, this dissertation analyzes the relationship between masculine identity and nature, as it is mediated by American technoculture. This relationship is marked by a discernible cultural malaise--a sense of profound dislocation in the midst of technological hypermediations of self and reality. This malaise suggests a conflict inherent in conceptions of masculinity as doubly-constituted through an impossible technological transcendence of nature on one hand and a simultaneous illusion of unmediated access to nature on the other. iii