Wendell Berry's Imagination in Place: Affection, Community, and Literature

Abstract

<p>This thesis argues that Wendell Berry’s idea of a healthy community and his understanding of membership is embodied in his fiction. The imagined community of Port William is neither an ideal blueprint for instantiating a new form of collective life in modern society, nor is it a nostalgic recreation of lost rural communities for representing an alternative culture. Berry’s imagination—both the creative process and its material products—is a funding current for both analyzing North American democracy and its failings as well as cultivating pluralities of communities that address these inadequacies. The form and discipline of Berry’s imaginative engagement with the particularities of his place uncovers the divine creativity operating in it; his fictional writing incarnates his conception and experience of this divine presence as God’s kenotic love. The upshot is not a simplistic return to traditional life but rather an affectionate and self-effacing approach to nature that converges with God’s manner of creating and relating to the world as it is conceived within the Christian tradition. Berry’s moral imagination emerges from a cultural approach to Christianity that engenders people who seek out those aspects of society and moments in life that are struggles—for justice, happiness, reconciliation—in order to incarnate a loving openness to others that does not re-inscribe further failures of Western consumer culture and political economy.</p> <p>Berry’s imagined community educates the affections in order to transform the way in which we relate to one another and treat the environment. His fiction is an education in being at home in the world as it is where we find it. Rather than theorizing the structure of a locally adapted community, or offering techniques for establishing the existence of such a community, Berry shows us how to live where we are through literary biography.</p>