The Place of Imagination - by Joseph R Wiebe (Hardcover)

About the Book

Loving place translates into loving people, which in turn transforms broken human narratives into restored lives rooted and ordered by their places.

Book Synopsis

Wendell Berry teaches us to love our places--to pay careful attention to where we are, to look beyond and within, and to live in ways that are not captive to the mastery of cultural, social, or economic assumptions about our life in these places. Creation has its own integrity and demands that we confront it.

In The Place of Imagination, Joseph R. Wiebe argues that this confrontation is precisely what shapes our moral capacity to respond to people and to places. Wiebe contends that Berry manifests this moral imagination most acutely in his fiction. Berry's fiction, however, does not portray an average community or even an ideal one. Instead, he depicts broken communities in broken places--sites and relations scarred by the routines of racial wounds and ecological harm. Yet, in the tracing of Berry's characters with place-based identities, Wiebe demonstrates the way in which Berry's fiction comes to embody Berry's own moral imagination. By joining these ambassadors of Berry's moral imagination in their fictive journeys, readers, too, can allow imagination to transform their affection, thereby restoring place as a facilitator of identity as well as hope for healed and whole communities. Loving place translates into loving people, which in turn transforms broken human narratives into restored lives rooted and ordered by their places.

Review Quotes

... The Place of Imagination is especially appropriate for those of us who teach Berry's fiction to undergraduates and have been looking for ways to draw out the real-world implications for young people who have been shaped by narratives of flight and upward mobility.

--Jack R. Baker "Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture"

...a brilliantly refreshing text that moves more responsively and generatively with Wendell Berry's writing than any others I have read. Reflectively engaging in the difficult imaginative processes of Berry's fictional characters and Berry himself, Wiebe incisively illuminates how we might endeavor to lean our lives into affectionate perception and responsive interaction that gradually transform violent legacies toward beloved communities.

--Romand Coles "Direction"

Overall, Wiebe's book succeeds in offering students and admirers of Berry's writing a nuanced and comprehensive analysis. This largely sympathetic reading of Berry will undoubtedly be an important contribution in and of itself. This study of the community-forming power of imagination will also be of interest to those working in the areas of ecological theology, environmental ethics, and theopoetics.

--Nathanael L. Inglis "Mennonite Quarterly Review"

The book beckons readers to hold Berry and his stories as a mirror--to engage in introspection and self-interrogation--that we might learn something about sympathy and affection needed for engaging our places non-imperialistically.

--Jacob Alan Cook "Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics"

As a whole, Wiebe's work is an impassioned monograph that shows the import of fiction--and Berry's fiction in particular--for helping readers learn to imagine transformed communities that seek to redress historical and current human traumas as well as environmental injury in our places.

-- "The Year's Work in English Studies"

A needed contribution for both the casual and scholarly reader of Wendell Berry.

--D. Dixon Sutherland "Reading Religion"

If the cultivation of 'place-based identity' and 'locally adapted communities' is the heartbeat of Berry's work, Joseph Wiebe in The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity establishes the irreducible role of the imagination as the sine qua non of such moral formation and explores the fictional characters of Berry's own imagine place of Port William, Kentucky as essential companions in this formation.

--Elizabeth R. Powell "Anglican Theological Review"

This book is essential for doing work in theology with Wendell Berry. It should be of interest to anyone wanting to cultivate a more affectionate imagination amidst an alienating economy.

--Gerald Ens "Conrad Grebel Review"

Wiebe masterfully demonstrates the transformative imagination that Berry embodies...

--Kathryn Bradford Heidelberger "The Christian Century"

Wiebe provides readers with a way to faithfully and honestly engage Berry's Port William stories.

--Josh Skinner "Christianity and Literature"

About the Author

Joseph R. Wiebe is Assistant Professor of Religion and Ecology at the University of Alberta, Augustana.