“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, November 3, 2012

Underground Ecocriticism Liveblog 17

Anne Raine, “Against the American Grain: Queer Saints, ‘Ecological Indians,’ and Nomadic Aesthetics in Cather and Stein.”
Modernism's anxiety about sentimental nature discourses. 
Modernism defines itself against realism and Romanticism and is often ignored by ecocriticism therefore. 
But they register a valuable ambivalence about nature. 
Cather and Stein replace ecological Indians with queer saints. Dismantling primitivism and heteronormativity. 
Pueblos as settled agricltural life >> harmony, heterosexual union. 
vs desert: abstracted forms, scarcity, differs from agrarian pastoral. 
Desert texts <> Deleuzian philosophy
Oh! Pioneers! etc offer spaces with apples, potatoes, corn, conversations, pastoral
Suffocating theme of earth's fecundity
Disassembled elements in the desert <> body without organs
 

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