| Description |
The writings of essayist, poet, novelist, and farmer Wendell Berry are a preeminent influence in an ongoing neo-agrarian renaissance. Drawing from his cannon of essays, fiction, and poetry, this work elucidates several key principles of Berry's "agrarian argument" including his sense of the relationship between culture, worship, and agriculture, his relationship to the past and the Western tradition, and the connections between urban and agricultural landscapes. This work argues that Berry's thought is not simply a nostalgic yearning for a never-realized agrarian ideal (as construed by some critics) but that Berry looks forward to the possibility of healthy communities (which for Berry include humans, animals, plants, and ecosystems) grounded in the health of the sustaining land, and that Berry's thought expands agrarian thought and practice beyond the family farm into rural and urban environments. This work examines Berry's critiques of industrial capitalism and current educational and religious thinking, and argues for Berry's twenty-first-century popular and academic relevance. From a broad focus on agrarian principles this work shifts to examine (primarily through the lens of his fiction) the proper relationship Berry imagines between humans and the surrounding world based on his metaphorical use of marriage and the moral exemplar of the husbandman to imagine a relationship of lifelong care and fidelity between individuals, community, and place. This work also examines Berry's sense of atonement, an integration of individuals to a sustaining pattern of community and an ultimately literal at-one-ment between humans, place, and the divinity Berry perceives as eminent in the world. |
