Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West

William R. Handley is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Marriage, Violence, and Nation in the American Literary West, coeditor of True West: Authenticity and the American West (Bison Books, 2007), and editor of The Brokeback Book: From Story to Cultural Phenomenon (Bison Books, 2011).

"William Handley is one of our most brilliant and provocative critics. In this book about the fraught history and perception of the American West, he uses close readings of texts, films, and paintings to understand how we've arrived at our present catastrophe, and what those who experienced and described it in the past can tell us about how we might still be able to face our future. This is a capacious, erudite, and timely book."—Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and A Terrible Country"Integrating Western American literary and cultural studies with the climate change scholarship in the environmental humanities, Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West offers a timely and powerful exploration of how key literary, visual arts, cinematic, and architectural texts produced during the last century have represented interlocking ecological, political, and cultural crises of the Anthropocene. With intellectual rigor, lucid prose, and interdisciplinary finesse, William Handley's brilliant close readings explore how his selected texts—these ranging from Clarence King to Mark Klett; from Zane Grey and Willa Cather to Christopher Isherwood and Tony Kushner—both obscure and illuminate the past environmental catastrophes that continue to shape our present crises, as well as excavate another possible 'horizon,' that of hope."—Stephen Tatum, author of Unhomely Wests: Essays from A to Z"A searching exploration of how twentieth-century artistic media, from novels, poems, and plays to re-photography and the transportation palimpsest of Los Angeles, expose the intimations of catastrophe and decolonization that haunt white settler colonialism. For William Handley, the American West is a palimpsest wherein the deep time of geology challenges and supersedes settler hegemonies and where ever-present catastrophe opens settler time to other worlds, 'between nihilism and paradise.'"—Stephanie LeMenager, coeditor of Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century

• List of IllustrationsIntroduction: Western Horizons of Catastrophe1. Viewing Western Rephotography in the Anthropocene2. The Reappearance of the Vanishing American: Catastrophe and Christianity in Silent Film3. Cather and Catastrophe4. Freeway Ecology: Picturing Time's Kaleidoscope, Hyperobjects, and the Wreckage of History in Los Angeles5. "Are We Doomed?" The Ecology of Democracy in Angels in AmericaConclusion: Still to Be DeterminedAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex