The literature of the senses: Superior traits in literature as counter-discourse

In this study, Chuck Palahniuk's dystopic postmodern novel Rant is analyzed in the context of Literature as Cultural Ecology. Hubert Zapf's Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts constitutes the theoretical background of our thesis. According to Zapf, creative literature contextualizes the fundamental relationship between culture and nature in multiple reflective and transformative ways and produces an ecological dimension of discourse. The theory of Literature as Cultural Ecology argues that creative literature functions as an ecological force within the broader system of culture and cultural discourses. Friedrich Nietzsche's distinguished work The Birth of Tragedy and Helene Deutsch's A Psychoanalytic Study of the Myth of Dionysus and Apollo have been effective in shaping our study. Western culture and civilization, the foundation of which is based on the philosophy of Ancient Greece and ontological dualism, instrumentalized and colonized nonhuman nature with an anthropocentric and pragmatic approach reaching its peak through modernity and the Enlightenment. Having gone through two world wars and the Industrial Revolution, the West had to face the fact that this pragmatic approach is not sustainable and, albeit late, felt the need to seek a new regenerative approach. Literature as Cultural Ecology, which has recently gained significance in ecological thought as a transdisciplinary field of study, argues that literary works have a symbolic response to ossified structures of the prevailing culture, and this reaction functions as a transformative and reintegrative force. In this context, the purpose of our study is to explain how Chuck Palahniuk's novel Rant functions as an ecological force within cultural discourses and to discuss how culture-nature conflict depicted in the novel can turn into a sustainable and balancing dynamic.