Literature and Geology

Samuel Beckett’s Geological Imagination addresses the ubiquity of earthy objects in Beckett’s prose, drama, and poetry, exploring how mineral and archaeological objects bear upon the themes, narrative locus, and sensibilities of Beckett’s texts in surprisingly varied ways. By deploying figures of ruination and excavation with etymological self- awareness, Beckett’s late prose narratives – Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho – comprise a late-career meditation on the stratigraphic layerings of language and memory over an extended writing career. These layers comprise an embodied record of writing in their allusions to literary history and to Beckett’s own oeuvre.

This paper was presented at the Ruskin Research Seminar of the Ruskin Library and Research Centre at the University of Lancaster.

This study examines excerpts from Praeterita, but with its main focus being centred around the theologically significant chapter entitled "The Grande Chartreuse", in which Ruskin discusses a range of issues from biblical interpretation to the Catholic-Protestant divide, as well as monastic orders, catechism, the divine aesthetics of nature, and his own so-called "un-conversion" experience at Turin in 1858.  Ruskin's style throughout Praeterita is sometimes digressive and excursive, yet contains elements of intensive and forensic analysis.  As autobiography it is unconventional, attempting to interrogate some of the rules of the genre, especially in terms of religious confession.  Despite this, the influence of other genre persist, and whilst he inverts the confessional flow from conversion to un-conversion, his polemic betrays an unconscious confessional which reveals aspects of a working theology that he has not necessarily deliberately outlined clearly.  Ruskin's Praeterita is not a thesis, but a retroactive diary, in which he is seemingly sometimes trying out ideas or appealing to the reader to come to the "right" conclusion that he has not yet found, and other times trying to remould and rework his life events to suit an ideological term he is trying to establish.  Throughout the often messy form of the theology presented, Ruskin reveals some glimmers of an anti-doctrinal and progressive universalist faith that has likely been developing before and beyond his "putting away" of Evangelicalism.  At other points, Ruskin's discussion unravels through deconstruction, and we find in Praeterita a more coherent incoherence of this progressive theology.  In this paper I will attempt to trace out how Ruskin intermittently and half-consciously reveals this theology and suggest ways in which it can inform thinking on Christian development.

In May, 1980, Mt. St. Helens erupted, releasing volcanic ash that reached from the Washington coast to Minnesota. Forty years later, in May, 2020, Duck Lake Books will release Crater & Tower by Cheryl J. Fish. This is a poetic response to the deadliest volcano in US History and the 911 attack on the Twin Towers, the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. These historic tragedies forever haunt the collective American consciousness, and this book will forever grace the collective American soul.