Restoring the Farm: From the Silent Toxic Sublime to a Post-Agricultural Sublime of Presence in Contemporary American (Non)Fiction

Recent works in American literature provide cultural responses to the Anthropocene imaginative challenges by no longer figuring farms as pastoral or romanticized “untouched” spaces but as either toxic or restored sacrifice zones. Preluding a global environmental movement, Rachel Carson’s short story “A Fable for Tomorrow” (1962), for example, portrays a “strange blight” of invisible toxic pesticides spreading “a shadow of death” and a “strange stillness” which left people “puzzled and disturbed” in a small American town (2000, 21-22). My approach to Carson’s “Fable” will shed light on the ecocritical potential of the “unnarrated” (Warhol 2005) and the “toxic sublime” (Peeples 2011) for bringing more visibility to forms of toxicity which are usually abstract or “hidden” in traditionally pastoral or sublime landscapes (Buckley and Youngs 2018, 289). In the second part of this presentation, I will conduct a narratological and rhetorical analysis of contemporary representations of the farm drawing from passages from Wendell Berry’s novels A Place on Earth (1983) and Remembering (1988), and Kristin Kimball’s The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food and Love (2011), which describe agricultural lands as endangered sacrifice zones while still opening the way for hope and systemic change through innovative approaches to community and organic farming. Lastly, I will examine how these works convey mixed sensory environmental emotions and aesthetic appreciation, ranging from awe, excitement and joy to disgust, despair and guilt, which beg for a reconsideration of our relationship to agricultural landscapes in contexts where intensive farming functions as the poster child for the destructive capitalist perception of the environment as an object of exploitation for massive food production.