Date of Award

Spring 2026

Abstract

Studying American literature produced during the Information Age, from 1970 to 2020, reveals an evolution of wild human resistance to the increasing powers of digital technology. These increasing powers include capturing attention, fostering dependence, and training behavior through a process I call digital domestication. Digital domestication distances people from wildness, and as William Cronon writes in “The Trouble with Wilderness”, “Learning to honor the wild—learning to remember and acknowledge the autonomy of the other—means striving for critical self-consciousness in all of our actions.” (20). Through this framework of wildness, one reads characters in fictional narratives resisting non-coercive new technologies as an attempt to reclaim authentic living. I look respectively at wild resistances to technological containment of wildness, including fighting, escaping, wandering, and nurturing, in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Vernon Chatman and John Lee’s Xavier Renegade Angel (2007-2008), and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019). These narratives all share what Heather Houser called infowhelm, or excessive information saturation, which I see as simulating hysteria, a common wild response to containment. With these texts, I aim to outline how violent, Romantic, and masculine interpretations of wildness ultimately become self-destructive or mad. Together, these texts outline how an increasing hysteria within technological containment is not alleviated through violence or aggression but rather through cultivating wildness within such entrapment. Nurturing wildness, as in allowing for autonomous growth that can tolerate risk and reciprocate with its environment, becomes the wild ethic of the future. This wildness ethic as a reading practice relates to ecofeminists like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Donna Haraway, who have pointed to reciprocity and making kin as ecological activism. As an act of sustained reciprocal imaginative participation, reading wild literature critically and attentively helps nurture autonomy and resistance to total domestication. By investigating these texts, this dissertation examines a wildness that persists and resists a technical society exhibiting increasing domestication over the natural world and its citizens. If there is to be a synthesis of human, natural, and technological existence, the logic of the Zoo (or containing wildness for spectacle) must be abandoned for that of the wild garden, where wildness can roam within the Garden of the Machine to regenerate constructive human release.

Document Type

Dissertation

First Advisor

Brigitte Bailey

Second Advisor

Monica Chiu

Third Advisor

Sandhya Shetty

Department or Program

English

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

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