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Recalling the Georgic: Land, Labor, and Literature in American Ecological Consciousness Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2020 Recalling the Georgic: Land, Labor, and Literature in American Ecological Consciousness Sam Horrocks West Virginia University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons Recommended Citation Horrocks, Sam, "Recalling the Georgic: Land, Labor, and Literature in American Ecological Consciousness" (2020). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 7540. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/7540 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Recalling the Georgic: Land, Labor, and Literature in American Ecological Consciousness Sam Horrocks Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Timothy Sweet, Ph.D, Chair Stephanie Foote, Ph.D John Lamb, Ph.D William Conlogue, Ph.D Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2020 Keywords: Georgic, Pastoral, Literature, Environment, Economics, Ecocriticism, Agriculture, Urbanization, Industrialization, Agrarianism Copyright 2020 Sam Horrocks ABSTRACT Recalling the Georgic: Land, Labor, and Literature in American Ecological Consciousness Sam Horrocks This dissertation argues that environmentalism and the environmental humanities are limited by an overinvestment in the discursive mode of pastoral, which provides the ecological logic of industrial urbanization by viewing the environment from the perspective of a leisured and alienated spectator. The pastoral mode enables environmental injustice by separating the realms of ecology and economy through a conventional elision of issues of labor and economics, rendering environmentalism unable to effect change within the spheres most important to ameliorating the pollution crisis. The pastoral mode thus frustrates the overarching goal of ecocriticism and environmentalism: we seek an ontological reunion of nature and culture within an urbanized economic system that perpetuates their separation. To theorize economics from an ecological perspective, I suggest ecocriticism elevate the pastoral’s undertheorized counterpart, the georgic mode, which conceives environment as a cultural space, from the perspective of an ethically engaged laborer. After making this theoretical argument in the introduction, chapters investigate the role of pastoral and georgic in the American economy and environmental imagination from the Revolution to today. Overall, this dissertation traces a gradual forgetting of the georgic mode within environmental discourse and labor concurrent with the expansion of urbanization, indicates the way this recession has enabled the global environmental crisis, and suggests how a popular recollection of georgic discourse could lead to a more sustainable and ethical mode of human life on earth. iii Table of Contents 1. The Pastoral Ascent in American Ecological-Economy 1 2. Burns and Georgic at the Industrial Turn 23 3. Crèvecoeur and the Roots of American Agrarianism 50 4. Thoreau's Transcendental Georgic 76 5. Sandburg and the Pastoral Logic of Urbanization 106 6. Recalling the Georgic 131 Bibliography 163 1 1. The Pastoral Ascent in American Ecological-Economy I. In the 21st-century, climate change is already disrupting the oil-fueled global economic order. Sea level rise, increasingly violent and high-stakes fuel wars, chaotic migration crises, and disruptions to industrial agricultural production are likely to drastically reduce not only the human population, but that of countless other species; some scientists predict an extinction event massive enough to haunt the geologic record for millennia. Our ability to respond to these ecological changes will be hampered by biodiversity loss and ecological instability caused by pollution and habitat destruction. And, of course, the brunt of the disaster is sure to be borne by human populations disadvantaged by geography, ethnicity, and general lack of political and economic capital. But the crisis isn’t environmental; the environment will be fine. It will bend, warp, twist and continue its constant activity of emergence. The crisis is human; the crisis is economic, and our economies are guided by our imaginations. Cultural theorists attempting to think ecologically, often working under the disciplinary banner of "ecocriticism," have aided the broader environmentalist movement by recognizing that our difficulty enacting positive ecological change is due not to a failing of politics or will, but of ontology, of how we conceptualize the nature of our being as a culture. Ecocriticism’s early and continuing aim is to develop new conceptions of the human relationship to our environment that can serve as a cultural rationale for, and spur to, broad social changes that reduce pollution and ecological exploitation, increase conservation, and remediate the effects of climate change. In this sense, ecocriticism is animated by the promise of a literary-theoretical "return to activism" and a "re-engagement with realism" that would extend outside of the academy to assist in the aversion of environmental catastrophe (Parini). Ecocriticism has made progress in that 2 reconceptualization by recognizing that the ontological foundations of modern society rest in a flawed Enlightenment separation of culture and nature into two distinct categories of being, a dichotomy closely layered beside those of the mind and body, human and nonhuman. These dubious dichotomies enable and cause social and environmental destruction by permitting economic exploitation of nonhuman beings, from animals and plants to aquifers, mountaintops, and dehumanized ethnic and gender groups. The central ecocritical project is to develop an alternate philosophical paradigm that is ecological and "biocentric," a vision of "natureculture" that, with widespread acceptance, can reveal the cruelties and injustice of environmental exploitation and ignite accordant political-economic change (Haraway, Buell Environmental). Over the last thirty years, ecocriticism has developed this idea into a sophisticated and influential theory of socio-ecology, inspired its application in fields across and beyond the humanities, and filtered it throughout society through the usual channels of teaching and writing. Yet though these concepts have successfully penetrated, influenced and helped expand the broader environmentalist movement, we have not witnessed much progress within our global economic systems. Environmentally destructive production and consumption habits are more widespread and necessary for human survival than ever before, and paradigms of "growth" still dominate economic discussion among academics, policy makers, and laymen. Rather than moving beyond the flawed ideological assumptions of classical liberalism, the West has reentrenched them in neoliberal politics, spurring the increasing concentration of global capital in the hands of fewer corporate interests operating largely beyond the jurisdiction of governmental regulatory bodies. And as these transnational corporate actors expand industrial pollution to immense magnitudes and we begin to witness the devastating effects of climate change in the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, the environmental movement 3 seems to be on the defense in the US and Europe, while political resistance to environmentalism has reinforced and entrenched its position. This is most evident in the apparent inability of the global political establishment to set, let alone achieve, the emission limits necessary to mitigate catastrophe for large portions of the world’s human population. Technological progress has enabled the development of cleaner energy sources, yet we appear to lack the ability to use them. Rather than the postcarbon future of renewable energy and consumptive shifts imagined by environmental activists, we appear to be entering what Michael Klare terms an era of "Tough Oil," in which the world’s political powers aggressively pursue the remaining reserves of fossil fuels to fuel increasingly desperate attempts to control the climate, despite greater environmental and social costs of extraction. As a movement that seeks to shape our cultural attitudes and actions toward our habitat, ecocriticism—and environmentalism more broadly—must ask itself where we are going wrong and what more we can do. Why, despite the enthusiasm and interest they generate, are our theorizations unable to penetrate the economy in which we need them to take root? One reason we do not have much of an answer is that we have not yet bothered much with the question. As Wendell Berry has been arguing since the 1970s, environmentalism "has no economic program, and because it has no economic program it has the status of
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