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Many critics consider Richard Brautigan’s 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America a coming-of-age account of a wayward, outsider narrator discovering that the pastoral mode is no longer viable in midcentury America. However, these readings often ignore Brautigan’s explicit political affinity and his conscious engagement with a specific setting—southern California in the mid- to late-60s. This paper explores Brautigan’s Counterculture ethic, which critiques the mindless prevalence of mainstream, middle-class America’s habit of consumption, production, and destruction of the natural world. Linking the lack of individual free will with the postwar technology boom, Brautigan engages with the natural landscape and in communities of one’s own making. As a result, the novel is peopled with alienated drop-outs, the victims of America’s technocracy. The “trout fishing in America” refrain, with its many incarnations, is one of the modes through which these characters’ operate within Counterculture principles, namely through their self-imposed poverty and criticism of the way America uses and abuses its citizens and the natural world., Muchos críticos consideran la novela de Richard Brautigan Trout Fishing in America (1967) un relato iniciático de un narrador forastero y obstinado que descubre que el modo pastoril ya no es viable en los Estados Unidos de mediados de siglo. Sin embargo, estas lecturas a menudo ignoran la afinidad política explícita de Brautigan y su compromiso consciente con un escenario específico -­‐ la California sureña de los últimos años de los años 60. Este ensayo explora la ética contracultural de Brautigan, que critica la preponderancia ciega de la clase media de los Estados Unidos y su hábito de consumo, producción y la destrucción del mundo natural. Conectando la falta de voluntad propia con el "boom" tecnológico posterior a la segunda guerra mundial, Brautigan se implica con el paisaje natural y en las comunidades de creación propia. Como resultado, la novela está llena de bohemios alienados, las víctimas de la tecnocracia estadounidense. El refrán "trout fishing in America," con sus muchas encarnaciones, es una de las formas en las que estos personajes actúan dentro de los principios contraculturales, concretamente a través de su pobreza auto -­‐ impuesta y del criticismo de la manera en que los Estados Unidos usan y abusan de sus ciudadanos y del mundo natural.

Reseña del libro: Azzarello, Robert. Queer Environmentality: Ecology, Evolution, and Sexuality in American Literature. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 159 p.

In this dissertation, I argue that early nineteenth-century American poets’ and readers’ interpretations of Romanticism shaped their understanding of the role poetry and its producers could play in a developing national culture. By examining the public careers and private sentiments of four male poets — William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jones Very — I analyze how each reconciled poetic vocation with the moral and economic obligations associated with the attainment of manhood. I locate these poets and their critics within specific historical discourses of aesthetic reception and production, focusing on the tensions and overlaps between Scottish Common-sense and Romantic aesthetic thought. Finally, I suggest that as a career objective the production of poetry paralleled rather than opposed the middle-class project of the “self-made man.” The effortful self-mastery urged upon young men by prescriptive writers was echoed in critics’ assessments of American poets’ works. Both the male poet and the self-made man operated within discourses which stressed imperatives — do, be, act — without specific objects. Yet, for aspiring poets, Romantic emphases on spontaneous composition and emotional expressiveness made deliberate craftsmanship irrelevant to poetic production. By identifying poetic production as spontaneous and as the highest form of disinterested intellectual labor, antebellum American critics and poets alike obscured the actual work involved in poetry writing. This erasure of conscious literary labor separated effort from its products, replacing a poet’s personal motives for writing poetry with the more nebulous goal of service, to be achieved through evidently inspired transcription than through purposeful composition. The title ‘poet’ suggested devotion to higher, more abstract goals, above mere commodity production. Each of these poets’ careers show how ambition compelled aspiring American poets to justify their work while disclaiming their individual hopes for their poetry and their reputations. Each poet promoted an understanding of poetic labor that demanded just such disclaimers. By underscoring the insubstantial and all but effortless nature of poetic composition itself, all four of these poets contributed to an enfeebled definition of the male poet — as a man who received impressions rather than produced them, and who observed rather than acted.