Max Porter's Ruderalism, or What Nature Is Now

Schoene, Berthold ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6536-9093 (2024) Max Porter's Ruderalism, or What Nature Is Now. Textual Practice. ISSN 0950-236X (In Press)

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Abstract

Focused on a close reading of Lanny (2019) and Shy (2023) this article draws attention to Max Porter’s portrayal of the ruderal margins of our human lifeworld as the dominant landscape of the Anthropocene. My analysis reaches beyond traditional conceptions of the ruderal as a liminal terrain vague, or ‘edgelands’, that constitutes a hybrid ‘third space’ between the cultural zone of urban or suburban settlements, on the one hand, and nature as incorporated by the countryside, or ‘the wilderness’, on the other. The article seeks to advance Environmental Humanities research by reading the ruderal as emblematic of the contemporary zeitgeist, or ‘structure of feeling’, in a time of escalating environmental despoliation. As I demonstrate, in the Anthropocene the ruderal usurps ‘nature’ and emerges as culture’s one and only enduring exteriority, an exteriority that escalates and gains in unpredictability and formidableness in direct proportion to the manifold anthropogenic disturbances inflicted upon it. The article traces Porter’s literary practice of a progressively ruderalist aesthetics from Lanny to Shy as he lets go of nature as it has been traditionally conceived in order to find new ways of relating to what nature has become in the Anthropocene, what nature is now. What this means for the novel is that it must cease as a humans-only monologue and recalibrate its aesthetic orientation from exclusive anthropocentric representation to more-than-human resonance and a ruderalist ecosemiotic rapport.