RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 “Blown away like apples by the fickle wind of the twentieth century”: counterculture resistance and the wilderness condition in Richard Brautigan's "Trout fishing in America"
A1 Anderson, Jill E.
K1 1960s
K1 Richard Brautigan
K1 Ecocriticism
K1 Años 60
K1 Ecocrítica
K1 Literatura
K1 Literature
K1 Medio ambiente
K1 Environmental science
AB 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.
PB Universidad de Alcalá
SN 2171-9594
YR 2013
FD 2013-04
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10017/20267
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10017/20267
LA eng
DS MINDS@UW
RD 19-abr-2024