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"Major, William H"
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Grounded vision : new agrarianism and the academy
In this book, the author puts contemporary agrarian thinking into a conciliatory and productive dialogue with academic criticism. He argues that the lack of participation in academic discussions means a loss to both agrarians and academics, since agrarian through can enrich other ongoing discussions on topics such as ecocriticism, postmodernism, feminism, work studies, and politics.
Book
Grounded vision
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Issues of
ecology—both as they appear in the works of nature writers
and in the works of literary writers for whom place and the land
are central issues—have long been of interest to literary
critics and have given rise over the last two decades to the
now-firmly established field of ecocriticism. At the same time, a
new group of ecology advocates has emerged since the 1960s:
contemporary agrarian writers such as Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson,
and Gene Logsdon draw their basic premises from the Nashville
Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s, and focus strictly on the
actual intersections of land and people, striving to enact a
healthy coexistence between the two. For agrarians, theory and
academic philosophizing often seem inconsequential and even
counterproductive. In
Grounded Vision , William Major puts contemporary
agrarian thinking into a conciliatory and productive dialogue
with academic criticism. He argues that the lack of participation
in academic discussions means a loss to both agrarians and
academics, since agrarian thought can enrich other ongoing
discussions on topics such as ecocriticism, postmodernism,
feminism, work studies, and politics—especially in light of
the recent upsurge in grassroots cultural and environmental
activities critical of modernity, such as the sustainable
agriculture and slow food movements. Major also focuses on
agrarianism itself—the valuable relationship it advocates
between workers and the land they work, the politics involved in
maintaining healthy communities, and the impact of contemporary
agrarian writers on the world today. Major thus shows
contemporary agrarianism to be a successful instigator of the
same social examination for which much academic criticism
strives. Major illuminates the ways in which agrarianism’s
wide scope and often-unyielding demands are founded in, and work
toward, a deep respect and understanding of the connections
between the health of the land and its peoples, communities, and
economies, and he argues that it raises questions about work,
leisure, consumerism, and science to such a degree that it leaves
little doubt how fundamental agriculture is to culture.
eBook
Grounded vision : new agrarianism and the academy / William H. Major
In this book, the author puts contemporary agrarian thinking into a conciliatory and productive dialogue with academic criticism. He argues that the lack of participation in academic discussions means a loss to both agrarians and academics, since agrarian through can enrich other ongoing discussions on topics such as ecocriticism, postmodernism, feminism, work studies, and politics.
eBook
Reconciliation
At a conference in 2002 I presented a paper on agrarian theories of work, including Wendell Berry’s argument that we all should engage in responsible labor, the kind that perpetuates the “kindly use” of the earth. There was some resistance in the audience, mostly from women who felt that agrarian life was retrograde, insulating, and ideologically suspect. Because of the association of agrarianism with exploitive domesticity, several people in the room intimated that agrarian life is best left as a thing of the past. The idea, therefore, that “agrarianism, the belief in the moral and economic primacy of farming over
Book Chapter
Introduction
It is a strange but auspicious fact that agriculture seems to occupy an increasingly large share of the American cultural consciousness. Consider a few recent publications: Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food (2008) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006); Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007); Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001); Nicolette Hahn Niman’s Righteous Porkchop (2009); and Lisa Hamilton’s Deeply Rooted (2009), to name but a few. Consider also the ongoing plaudits for restaurateur and pioneering food guru Alice Waters; the building cultural tide of the slow-food movement; the proliferation of community-supported agriculture and farmers’ markets and the comparative rise
Book Chapter
A Theory of Use
Although ecocriticism has grown immeasurably in popularity and stature since 1990, one of the more striking aspects about this burgeoning area of study is just how little attention it has paid to the contributions rural peoples have made to an environmental ethos. Perhaps this neglect is simply a result of definition, for as Michael Branch and Scott Slovic note, ecocriticism has evolved out of an “understanding that [it] was a scholarly perspective attuned to the place of the more-than-human world in particular works of art” (XV, emphasis added). And though Cheryll Glotfelty and others understand the ecocritical impetus as arriving
Book Chapter
A Theory of Resistance
Among the shifting political moods in the United States, the one that apparently holds over time is that moneyed interests invariably trump all else in the realm of realpolitik, and that substantive change—the mantra of the elections of 2008—runs hard against entrenched interests. Whether or not civic engagement as an ideal aspect of republicanism still holds purchase on the imagination of the American public is a question that bedevils pundits, political scientists, and many others concerned that the vision of an informed, participatory citizenry not enervated by luxury or indifference is a thing of the past. In addition,
Book Chapter
Afterword
One summer afternoon in graduate school at Indiana University I took a sabbatical from my heavy diet of literary and cultural theorists and picked up Wendell Berry’s What Are People For? (1990). As an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky I had once heard Berry speak in person, but I was otherwise unfamiliar with his work. He never made our reading lists, and though he seemed to be someone I should know about, in retrospect no one made it clear why. As I read What Are People For?—a book addressing literature, rural America, farming, environmentalism, and more—that summer
Book Chapter
What Are People For?
One of the more curious glitches in cultural criticism and literary studies, including ecocriticism, is the relative lack of attention we pay to work. “Our current arguments about American literature,” William Conlogue writes, “do not adequately address how questions about work, community, technological restraint, and human uses of nature changed with the introduction of an urban-defined industrial agriculture that has erased the pastoral’s central tension between city and country” (9). While there is some evidence that work—even agricultural work—is now becoming the subject of critical interest, the subject has yet to rise to the importance of race, class,
Book Chapter
Conclusion
Can the benefits associated with certain aspects of rural living ever compete with mass-marketed urban and suburban culture? Can—or should—a society increasingly composed of urbanites and suburbanites adapt to or adopt aspects of new agrarianism in the twenty-first century? The issue I would like to consider is how new agrarianism—rooted, place-bound, recalcitrant toward modernity—can find a role in a world arguably driven by globalism as both a philosophy and as a material practice, especially when we consider that the effects of globalism are often felt most profoundly by people on the margins. Many of these people,
Book Chapter