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<p>Building on Donna Haraway’s advocacy for embracing “unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles” (<italic>Trouble</italic> 4), this paper reads Sherri L. Smith’s <italic>Orleans</italic> (2013) with a focus on how, in the face of profound environmental challenges, stereotypical narratives of heroism are transformed—like in a compost pile—through cyborg-elements. The essay argues that grounding hero stories in the techno-organismal entanglements of ecosystemic crisis, yields an explicitly instable, corporeal conception of heroism in/of crisis of <italic>eco-heroism</italic>. Reading Smith’s protagonists, Fen and Daniel, as eco-heroic cyborgs in conjunction with ideals of the traditional hero’s corporeal and affective superiority creates instances of hopeful heroics in the narrative that challenge supposedly stabilizing patterns of identification in traditional discourses of American heroism. This vision of cyborg eco-heroism in <italic>Orleans</italic> makes communicable an unpredictable and instable crisisstate, generating hope as a composted affect in this eco-heroic story of oddkin. (LB)</p>
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Building on Donna Haraway’s advocacy for embracing “unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles” (Trouble 4), this paper reads Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans (2013) with a focus on how, in the face of profound environmental challenges, stereotypical narratives of heroism are transformed—like in a compost pile—through cyborg-elements. The essay argues that grounding hero stories in the techno-organismal entanglements of ecosystemic crisis, yields an explicitly instable, corporeal conception of heroism in/of crisis of eco-heroism. Reading Smith’s protagonists, Fen and Daniel, as eco-heroic cyborgs in conjunction with ideals of the traditional hero’s corporeal and affective superiority creates instances of hopeful heroics in the narrative that challenge supposedly stabilizing patterns of identification in traditional discourses of American heroism. This vision of cyborg eco-heroism in Orleans makes communicable an unpredictable and instable crisisstate, generating hope as a composted affect in this eco-heroic story of oddkin. (LB)

Hoping for Cyborgs: Cyborg Eco-Heroism, Odd Kinships, and Hopeful Heroics in Sherri L. Smith’s <italic>Orleans</italic>

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Hoping for Cyborgs: Cyborg Eco-Heroism, Odd Kinships, and Hopeful Heroics in Sherri L. Smith’s 

Building on Donna Haraway’s advocacy for embracing “unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles” (Trouble 4), this paper reads Sherri L....

Hoping for Cyborgs: Cyborg Eco-Heroism, Odd Kinships, and Hopeful Heroics in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans

Published Online: Jun 28, 2023

Page range: 34 - 57

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30608/hjeas/2023/29/1/3

Keywords
eco-heroism, hopeful heroics, corporeality, cyborg, oddkin, affect studies

© 2023 Lorena Bickert, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Hoping for Cyborgs: Cyborg Eco-Heroism, Odd Kinships, and Hopeful Heroics in Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans

Published Online: Jun 28, 2023

Page range: 34 - 57

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30608/hjeas/2023/29/1/3

Keywordseco-heroism, hopeful heroics, corporeality, cyborg, oddkin, affect studies

© 2023 Lorena Bickert, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Keywords
eco-heroism, hopeful heroics, corporeality, cyborg, oddkin, affect studies