Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Desert Distortion

Desert Distortion

Osuna, Celina

Paperback

Series: Desert Humanities

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1682832627
ISBN13: 9781682832622
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Published: Sep 16 2025
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
This book intersects environmental humanities, critical theory, and literary criticism with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages as well as nonhuman forces and elements like heat, distance, and light. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality and abundance of desert places.

In working against static representations of the Desert Southwest that have persisted throughout popular culture, the book employs the term desert distortion as a productive way to use the desert's agency in texts to unsettle old understandings and allow for experiencing the dynamic desert anew. Hence the title's use of the word revealing: it is an argument that the desert is and has always been abundant.

The book's main aim is to read abundance in literature from and about the Southwest, applying desert distortion to perform multiple, coexisting understandings of desert places, and consequently of place more broadly. Through expansiveness of vision and curiosity of exploration, the desert then becomes a place of interconnection, proliferation, and imagination.


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