CCLCS Seminar Series: Kate Rigby
Wednesday April 8 2009
‘Come Forth Into the Light of Things’: Material Spirit and Negative Ecopoetics
Kate Rigby
In a poem from 1937 addressed to future generations, Bertold Brecht famously declared that to engage in a conversation about trees was almost a crime since it meant keeping silent about the grievous socio-political ills of the day (above all, the rise of fascism). In this paper, I argue that in our own ‘dark times’ of deepening ecosocial woes, not to talk about trees would be the greater crime. The central question that I want to address here is how literature, and in particular lyric poetry, might contribute to this pressing conversation. Recalling Adorno’s comments on poetry after Auschwitz, I propose that in the era of accelerating ecocide, to write about trees (and other non-human others) poetically is both utterly necessary and profoundly problematic. As I have argued elsewhere, the kind of ecopoetics that is called for in this context necessarily has a ‘negative’ dimension. Focussing my discussion around William Wordsworth’s strange summons in “The Tables Turned” to “come forth into the light of things”, this paper elaborates the theory of negative ecopoetics as a literary practice that is radically subversive of those dualistic habits of thought which, in severing spirit from matter, mind from body, and man from nature, have both informed, and been informed by, historical patterns of relationship among humans and other others that can now be seen as intrinsically unethical and ultimately ecocidal.
Kate Rigby is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature. Her publications include Out of the Shadows: Contemporary German Feminist Theory (1996), Transgressions of the Feminine (1996) and Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004).