Re-Constructing the Rust Belt: An Exploration of Industrial Ruin in Blogs, Fiction, and Poetry.

Literary and cultural critics have long relied on Depression-era iconography to describe the postindustrial. However, the facades of shuttered factories, not the faces of working-class people, define the landscape of postindustrial social life called the Rust Belt. As an entry-point for understanding the postindustrial condition in America, what do industrial ruins offer? What forms of agency do they enable and foreclose? This dissertation investigates the cultural meanings of industrial ruin by examining how contemporary artists harness “new” and “old” media to confront and appropriate the decaying industrial landscape – its neighborhoods, its survivors, and its legacies. In three case studies, I examine new or under-theorized materials that grapple with the Rust-Beltization of America: Urban Explorers’ digital photo-texts; an emergent body of Rust Belt novels; and documentary “remixes” by activist poet Mark Nowak. This varied archive transgresses the disciplinary boundaries that shape contemporary Rust Belt scholarship. Chapter One investigates the Web culture of UrbExers who make industrial ruins their visual and narrative terrain. By analyzing two Explorers’ expansive photo-texts archives, I reframe UrbEx narratives as performances whereby Explorers fashion themselves into inheritors of lost industrial labor. Their romantic visions of masculine labor and decline reflect a selective historical consciousness fostered by encounters with found objects in abandonments. Chapter Two reads Rust Belt fiction as a search for narrative closure. I examine how Richard Russo’s Empire Falls and Michael Collins’s The Keepers of Truth gender the violence of industrial ruination. Positing an industrial unconscious, I argue that these exemplary Rust Belt novels respond to the displacement of industrial labor through displaced narratives that target gender as a site of blame. Chapter Three analyzes how Mark Nowak’s anti-nostalgic Shut Up Shut Down shifts attention from ruined buildings to ravaged lives. His collage-poems use enjambment to bridge the “post/industrial break” that fragments working-class history into eras of prosperity and decline. His poetry fosters a collective consciousness that transcends the ongoing fragmentation of working-class communities. Across these diverse Rust-Belt engagements, my dissertation queries how contemporary artists gender industrial labor and ruination as a means of processing the loss of social agency by economic decline.PhDEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110357/1/asynith_1.pd