| Midwestern modernists such as Anderson, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ruth Suckow, turn to nature, and particularly to the fertile Midwestern land, the site of their region's and of America's unfulfilled pastoral dream, to find answers for the spiritual desert of a mechanistic, dehumanized culture. Along with many prominent cultural critics of the time, these authors blame the American spiritual dilemma on the legacy of a Protestant, and especially Calvinist, epistemology that replaced the old mystery-laden sacramentalism with an ultimately deadening literalism. In these authors' works, the Midwestern land fails to sustain the dreams imposed upon it and thus teaches humans to return to a more concrete, humble, and sacramental relation to the world---to the realization of an existential mystery that can only be gradually understood via full personal, experiential, and caring engagement rather than via abstract categories, presupposed conceptual systems, and ideological "grammars."... |
