/lit/ - Literature

>>19465387
https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Timothy%20Morton%20-%20Ecology%20without%20Nature%20Rethinking%20Environmental%20Aesthetics.pdf

There is nothing more "literary" than this activity of acknowledging, in the negative, the suction of fictional writing. And it is not a matter of being more, or less, sophisticated than others. The kitsch of an Aldo Leopold, writing a journal (an "almanac ") to convey nature in a suitable (non)aesthetic form, meets the avant-garde strategy of a minimalist painter who puts an empty frame in an art gallery, or a pile of "stuff" without a surrounding frame; or a John Cage, making music out of silence or out of ambient noise. Leopold's A Sand County Almanac tries to escape the pull of the literary, in much the same way as avant-garde art tries to escape the conventional aesthetic. Levertov's "To the Reader" is highly literary, going so far as to compare the rolling waves with the turning of a text's pages. There is no guilt about writing here. Levertov does point beyond the specific event of the words on the page, the voice intoning the words. But somehow "To the Reader" achieves a sense of the surrounding environment, not by being less artful, but by being more so. This conscious, reflexive, postmodern version is all the more ecomimetic for that.