Breece D’J Pancake

Although Breece D’J Pancake published only a handful of short stories during his brief life, their mastery has secured him a high ranking in Appalachian literature. Born and reared in Milton, West Virginia, Pancake completed his BA degree in English education at Marshall University in 1974. He taught at two military high schools, Fort Union and Staunton, before studying creative writing at the University of Virginia. Pancake felt culturally at odds with the university’s traditionally elite student body, and while there, he cultivated a “mountain man” persona. (In truth, Pancake did enjoy hunting and fishing throughout his life.) Pancake’s unusual middle name was the result of a printer’s error at the ...

The Dalit Mountain Man and New Commons

This chapter draws its inspiration from some of the radical African American environmental writings on common and public spaces to highlight the connections between caste, commons, and environment. These are explicated in the first half of the chapter in detail. The second half of the chapter undertakes a case study of a Dalit in Bihar—Dashrath Manjhi. Through this study, it searches how social identities and environmental practices are shaped by a Dalit’s specific experience of a common space. In this chapter, the author attempts to establish the importance of seeing Dashrath Manjhi as an environmentalist with a difference, whose social and environmental knowledge and intervention in common space was situated and constructed within a particular caste and class, social and economic setting.

T. C. Boyle’s The Harder They Come: Violence in America

T. C. Boyle’s fifteenth novel The Harder They Come (2015) offers a fictional inquiry into the American propensity for violence and takes its title from Jimmy Cliff’s 1972 reggae song and its motto from D. H. Lawrence’s characterization of the “essential American soul [as] hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer” (1978: 68). The article investigates how Boyle creates a metafictional historiography by combining two unrelated historical events – the bare-handed killing of a mugger by an elderly American veteran in Costa Rica and the long police hunt for the schizophrenic murderer Aaron Bassler in the Mendocino Redwoods – with a fictional character who represents the paranoid fringe worlds of sovereign citizens. The article then shows how Boyle embeds his plot in a general atmosphere of menace and incorporates the legend of the heroic mountain man John Colter, thus adding historical depth and evoking the world of wilderness survivalists. It also examines the narrative techniques, such as the choice of a schizophrenic’s point of view, and the stylistic features employed in order to fuse these ingredients into a thrilling tale that reveals the hidden relations between American foundation myths and the threats of contemporary gun violence.