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Record Nr. |
UNINA9910460594203321 |
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Autore |
Schuster Joshua |
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Titolo |
The ecology of modernism : American environments and avant-garde poetics / / Joshua Schuster |
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Pubbl/distr/stampa |
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Tuscaloosa, Alabama : , : The University Alabama Press, , 2015 |
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©2015 |
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ISBN |
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Descrizione fisica |
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1 online resource (233 p.) |
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Collana |
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Modern and Contemporary Poetics |
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Disciplina |
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Soggetti |
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American poetry - History and criticism |
Modernism (Literature) - United States |
Ecology in literature |
Environmental protection in literature |
Literature, Experimental - United States |
Electronic books. |
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Lingua di pubblicazione |
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Formato |
Materiale a stampa |
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Livello bibliografico |
Monografia |
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Note generali |
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Description based upon print version of record. |
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Nota di bibliografia |
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Includes bibliographical references and index. |
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Nota di contenuto |
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Contents; Preface: Conceptualizing Modernism's Ecologies; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Regeneration through Pollution; 1. Fables: On the Morals of Marianne Moore's Animal Monologues; 2. Ambience: How to Read Gertrude Stein's Natures; 3. Blues: Race and Environmental Distress in Early American Blues Music; 4. Traffic: Noise as an Ecological Aesthetic in the Art of John Cage; 5. Contaminated Life: Biopolitics after Rachel Carson; 6. Conclusion; Afterword: Where Is the Oil in Modernism?; Notes; Bibliography; Index |
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Sommario/riassunto |
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"The Ecology of Modernism explores the unexpected absence of an environmental ethic in American modernist and avant-garde poetics, given its keen concern with an environmental aesthetic, and explains why American modernism was never green. Examining the relationships of key modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial development, and pollution, Joshua Schuster posits that the curious failure of modernist poets to develop an environmental ethnic was a deliberate choice and not an inadvertent omission"-- |
" In The Ecology of Modernism, Joshua Schuster examines the |
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relationships of key modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial development, and pollution. He posits that that the curious failure of modernist poets to develop an environmental ethnic was a deliberate choice and not an inadvertent omission. In his opening passage, Schuster boldly invokes lines from Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which echo as a paean to pollution: "Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall!" Schuster labels this theme "regeneration through pollution" and demonstrates how this motif recurs in modernist compositions. This tolerance for, if not actual exultation of, the by-products of industrialization hindered modernist American artists, writers, and musicians from embracing environmentalist agendas. Schuster provides specific case studies focusing on Marianne Moore and her connection of fables with animal rights; Gertrude Stein and concepts of nature in her avant-garde poetics; early blues music and poetry and the issue of how environmental disasters (floods, droughts, pestilence) affected black farmers and artists in the American South; and John Cage, who extends the modernist avant-garde project formally but critiques it at the same time for failing to engage with ecology. A fascinating afterword about the role of oil in modernist literary production rounds out this work. Schuster masterfully shines a light on the modernist interval between the writings of bucolic and nature-extolling Romantics and the emergence of a self-conscious green movement in the 1960's. This rewarding work shows that the reticence of modernist poets in the face of resource depletion, pollution, animal rights, and other ecological traumas is highly significant"-- |
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