Places of Rest: Modernism and Environmental Recovery


Participants


Andrew Kalaidjian
English
UC Santa Barbara


Places of Rest argues that literary modernism’s presentation of human fragility amidst exhausted environments challenged problematic industrial and imperial narratives of unlimited progress and contributed to the rise of ecological awareness and recovery efforts in the 20th century. The project outlines a modernist aesthetic of slowness, immediacy and introspection alongside a cultural history of nature protection in the United Kingdom, drawing on the archives of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, founded in 1912, which invoked a threatening rhetoric of Nature’s total exhaustion under the march of modern development. Faced with the restless and inescapable forces of modernization, writers shifted away from the withdrawn, “restful contemplation” of Immanuel Kant and the Romantics and moved towards an increasingly materialist attention to the world as an immersive stream of human and nonhuman connections that are interdependent and all too often hierarchical in problematic ways. The Anglophone novel, in particular, as it develops through D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys and Chinua Achebe, becomes increasingly attuned to constructions of personal, social and planetary identity in relation to environmental control and exploitation. Highlighting the physical limitations that deny autonomy to human life, these writers communicate the unsustainability of relentless modernization and foreground the importance of recovery and regeneration for ecological and communal wellbeing.