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