(Dis)Composed Dwelling: Writing Ruins of Disaster

Abstract

This essay examines metonym as a specific move present in disaster narratives of the Galveston Storm of 1900 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Metonyms reveal the nature of the human/ruin relationship resulting from natural disasters. This essay also contributes to the development of a lexicon for describing disaster life writing.

Keywords:

• Dwelling
• hurricanes
• listening
• metonym

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Greene and Kelley, Night of Horrors, 36.

2 I use the term dwelling in the Heideggarian sense. For Heidegger, the deeper meaning of dwelling—namely the temporary Being-Toward-Death that is human existence—gets buried under the production of buildings. Clearing a space, making room, requires things. Thus, Heidegger concludes, “spaces open up by the fact that they are let into the dwelling of man.” Space then operates as an inside/outside, an already here and an already there, that allows us to “come back to ourselves from things without ever abandoning our stay among things” (107). The ruin stays with the human—it dwells (dis)composed. Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” 107.

3 Arribert-Narce, “Narrating Fukushima,” 314.

4 Lee, “Semiotics of Disaster,” 888.

5 Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 581; Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 3.

6 “NOAA Press Release.”

7 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 5.

8 Ibid., 61.

9 Reynolds, Geographies of Writing, 4. Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson prefer the word “site” to something like “place” or “setting” because “site” “speaks to the situatedness of autobiographical narration” (58). I follow their use of this term as both a place and an ontological location in life narratives of ruin.

10 Ibid., 4.

11 Huff, “After Auto, after Bio,” 279.

12 Davis, Inessential Solidarity, 26. Davis’s definition of exposure draws on phenomenologist Jean-Luc Nancy’s work to describe what she calls rhetoricity, or an a priori condition of being rhetorical.

13 Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 4.

14 Ibid., 9.

15 Ibid., 10.

16 Ibid., 11.

17 Kilian and Wolf, Life Writing and Space, 2.

18 Nagy, Masterpieces of Metonymy, 10.

19 Greene and Kelley, Night of Horrors, 116.

20 Ibid., 117.

21 Tuana, “Viscous Porosity,” 192.

22 Ibid., 192.

23 Lipari, Listening, Thinking, Being, 57.

24 Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening, 93. Emphasis mine.

25 Ibid., 27.

26 Ibid., 17.

27 Greene and Kelley, Night of Horrors, 20.

28 Ibid., 20.

29 Ibid., 21.

30 Ibid., 21.

31 Ibid., 22.

32 Ibid., 22.

33 Ibid., 30.

34 Ibid., 30.

35 Ibid., 30.

36 Ibid., 31.

37 Ibid., 31.

38 Ibid., 31.

39 Ibid., 31.

40 Ibid., 31.

41 Ibid., 34.

42 Ibid., 64.

43 Blanchot, Disaster, 38.

44 Walrond, “hurricane harvey”; Stacey, “Hurricane Harvey: And Why I Can’t Mark Myself Safe.”

45 Jennifer U, “Elegy for a Home.”

46 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miriam Rowntree

Miriam Rowntree works as a Senior Lecturer at The University of Texas at Tyler. She teaches rhetoric and composition, British Literature, as well as special topics courses on nature and the environment. Her areas of specialty include rhetorical ecologies, feminist rhetoric, life writing, and Romanticism. She also writes fiction, poetry, and personal essay. Her current work focuses on architectural ruins and their potential for community engagement in the aftermath of natural disasters. Miriam studies life narratives for responses to the rhetoric of ruin. She weaves together human and nonhuman stories to reveal the ecologies that shape twenty first century settlement in the Anthropocene.