For fun, here are some titles I'm consulting for my 'ecomonstrous' reading of Lafferty's bioregional fiction (i.e. mostly his stories set in Oklahoma or the Southwest—or that are flavoured that way even if taking place, say, on another planet, e.g. 'Smoe and the Implicit Clay'—and which feature the nonhuman). The major areas of research are basically the U.S. (South)West (mainly through Native American Studies and Frontier Tall Tales), Ecocriticism (mainly through Object-Oriented Ontology and New Materialism), and Ecotheology (mainly through contemporary ecological readings of Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar, though also through some theologians engaging New Materialism and the concept of the Anthropocene). As to the Monsters and Monstrous element, I feel like I'm largely forging my own way here. Monster Studies is still a fairly nascent field and it tends to deal almost exclusively with culture (race, gender, class, etc.) and very rarely with ecology or nonhumans. And even with all these conceptual parameters I am, of course, only mapping a small portion of Lafferty's erudite brain. At my lowest times I feel overwhelmed, out of my depth, and/or off on a goose chase of implausibility. (If it's a mud goose, then maybe I'm okay. See Lafferty's story 'Boomer Flats'.) At my highest times, I'm absolutely soaring with the joy of learning about all of these fields and far more so with the joy of reading Lafferty's fiction closely and feeling as if perhaps a few things are just possibly unlocking and connecting a bit.
Below is a tiny fraction of the bibliography, and of course doesn't touch upon all the journal articles that go into it as well. But it's a quick colourful distraction. Here's hoping I can make a coherent argument out of what might appear to be all these disparate materials:
4 comments:
Yes! Glad to hear this is still moving forward, and what a great way to make something as sometimes inscrutable as a dissertation bibliography accessible and interesting. These covers alone make me want to read your research-- and happy to see some OOO in there!
-Steve
Thanks for commenting, Steve! Good to know folks are still interested. I hope you get to read it!
I read this post the day you posted it. I re-read it today and decided that I should comment.
Daniel, I am eagerly awaiting your green-growing thesis.
I'm finishing up a first read of The Flame is Green right now. It's pretty amazing.
“Listen, all you people, the green-growing world is not restricted to its vegetation. There is a green-growing God above, there are green-growing people on the earth, and plants and rocks and ores and machineries, and graces and dedications and ideas and arts. There are green-growing prayers arising. But the devils in Hell are not green-growing, and those on Earth are not.
...
“In this growing out there are no really new things or new situations. There are only things growing out right, or things growing out deformed and shriveled. There is nothing new about railways or foundries or lathes or steel furnaces. They also are green-growing things. There is nothing new about organizations of men or of money. All these growing things are good, if they grow towards the final answers that were given in the beginning. But in their medium growth they must not be rigid. It is not a girder-steel bridge we make; it is a living liana-vine bridge that we grow and fling out in exaltations of arches. Only the final things are beyond change, being beyond time: but rigidity is too small a word for them. All grows well for a while, you see, and then —
Thanks, John! Sorry I missed this comment. I dearly love these passages from The Flame is Green. Do you have the second Coscuin book, Half a Sky? I'm about half way through and I think it's generally even better than Flame is Green.
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