Environmental Humanities Research Group work-in-progress seminar with Georg Wink and Martyn Bone

Talk by George Wink (ENGEROM) on the innovation of nature writing by Cristina Rivera Garza, and work-in-progress session by Martyn Bone (ENGEROM).

Abstracts

Martyn Bone

A Flood of Imitation: Intertextual aesthetics of ecological crisis in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God

In this work-in-progress presentation, I will consider how Cormac McCarthy, in Jay Watson’s words, “writes within and against the literary legacy of [William] Faulkner” by re-reading McCarthy’s third novel Child of God (1973) concerning Faulkner’s fiction, and through an environmental as well as intertextual lens.  I do so in part by adapting to Child of God Susan Scott Parrish’s approach to “the modern aesthetics of ecological crisis” in Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930). I also consider how McCarthy “recycles” Faulkner in the sense that Sineád Moynihan has discussed: moving beyond familiar notions of “literary worth and value” associated with “‘recycling’ a canonical text” to foreground “all that is framed as ‘waste,” including wasteland and human beings.  I take seriously, and somewhat literally, reviewer Orville Prescott’s early charge that McCarthy’s fiction is “submerge[d]” in a neo-Faulknerian “flood of imitation.” For in As I Lay Dying and Child of God alike, it is a disastrous flood – and relatedly, devastating deforestation--that lays waste to rural southern landscapes and their marginal populations. The catastrophe that “begins to engulf the world” of Faulkner’s fiction and (a generation later) McCarthy’s is one that we now recognize all too well: environmental and anthropogenic, its apocalyptic tenor registers on the regional and planetary scales of the Anthropocene.

Georg Wink

How to Write Geologically an Autobiography of Cotton. An Approach to Cristina Rivera Garza

In 2020 the Mexican writer and literary scholar Cristina Rivera Garza presented her novel Autobiografía del algodón [Autobiography of Cotton]. Two years later, a theory book turned her method into “geological writing” and tested this approach by analyzing a broad corpus of Latin American literature. Drawing on the long tradition of Nature Writing, the author – who in 2024 won a Pulitzer Prize – develops writing strategies which rethink the subgenre and imbed it in the specific Latin American context of coloniality. Among the innovations which Rivera Garza showcases in her fiction and explains in her theory are “textual desedimentation”, “poetics of desappropriation”, “comunalitarian writing” and “inhabitedness”. Through these, she seeks to go beyond known binarizing, objectivizing or exoticizing constraints of eco-fiction as well as to address the notorious problem of writing on behalf of the subaltern other. The result is an “autobiography” of cotton which intends to materialize the suffered experiences of the “voiceless” human and more-than-human. In my presentation, I will briefly introduce the literary tradition Rivera Garza dialogues with and to the specific regional context she addresses. Hereafter I will discuss her “geological” writing procedures through text samples and refer to her theoretical framework.