Texas Tech University Press -- Xerophilia

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11/2008. 264 pages.
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978-0-89672-638-3

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A bioregional consideration of writings from America’s desert places

Xerophilia
Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature

Tom Lynch
with foreword by Scott Slovic

In the arid places of the American Southwest grow organisms described as desert-loving, or xerophilous. Extending this metaphor to the writers and writings of the region, Tom Lynch presents the first systematically ecocritical study of its multicultural literature.

By revaluing nature and by shifting literary analysis from an anthropocentric focus to an ecocentric one, Xerophilia demonstrates how a bioregional orientation opens new ways of thinking about the relationship between literature and place. Applying such diverse approaches as environmental justice theory, phenomenology, border studies, ethnography, entomology, conservation biology, environmental history, and ecoaesthetics, Lynch demonstrates how literature is embedded within and symbiotic with the encompassing more-than-human world that enables and sustains it. Analyzing works in a variety of genres by writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, Ray Gonzales, Charles Bowden, Susan Tweit, Gary Paul Nabhan, Ann Zwinger, and Janice Emily Bowers, this study reveals how southwestern writers, in their powerful role as community storytellers, contribute to the evolution of a sustainable bioregional culture that enables inhabitants to live imaginatively, intellectually, and morally in the arid bioregions of the American Southwest.

“[W]hether I notice or not, the landscape suffuses my body. Unidentifiable scents enter my lungs with each breath: the mingled smells of dust, rock, juniper, turpentine bush, mountain mahogany, the heady mix of volatile oils of the creosote bush, and the ever-so-subtle odor of blue sky. Though less often articulated, all of my senses, not just vision, are engaged; the phenomena of this world circulate through me, and I through them. The landscape caresses as I pass through. . . . On my feet again, I hobble from stiffness, throw my pack on, and, leaning on my sotol stalk for balance, begin to pick my way zigzag down the long rocky slope. I am in love with this landscape. I am, indeed, a devoted xerophile.” —from the introduction

Tom Lynch is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he teaches ecocriticism and place-conscious literature. He is currently co-editing critical anthologies of writer Loren Eiseley and of bioregional literary criticism. He is also working on a study comparing literature of the American West and the Australian Outback from ecocritical and postcolonial perspectives. He lives in Lincoln.