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Ecology of Modernism - American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (Paperback, 2)
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Ecology of Modernism - American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (Paperback, 2)
Series: Modern and Contemporary Poetics
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The Ecology of Modernism explores the unexpected absence of an envi
ronmental ethic in American modernist and avant-garde poetics,
given its keen concern with an ecological esthetic. Joshua Schuster
explains why American modernism was never green. In The Ecology of
Modernism, Joshua Schuster examines the rela tionships 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 Whit man's
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which echo as a paean to pollution:
"Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at
night fall!" 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 industri alization hindered modernist American
artists, writers, and musicians from embracing environmentalist
agendas. Schuster provides specific case studies about 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 fas cinating afterword about the
role of oil 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 emer gence of a self-conscious green movement in the 1960s.
This reward ing 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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