SCHOLARS EMBARK ON STUDY OF LITERATURE
ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT
By Karen J. Winkler
The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 August 1996: page A8+
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Scholars Embark on Study of LITERATURE About the ENVIRONMENT."
Using this article in your writing.
In the late 1980s, Cheryll Burgess was
finishing her dissertation on American women authors when she realized that she
was more interested in another topic – environmental literature.
She was intrigued by
authors from Henry David Thoreau to Edward Abbey who wrote about nature, but she could find no
field of literary criticism devoted to analyzing their writing. True, she came
across scattered books and essays on what she thought of as an ecological
approach to literature, but the authors didn't even seem aware of each other's work.
So she set
about compiling a bibliography of nature writers and the scholars who discussed
them, sending the material to all the names on her list for whom she could find
addresses. She asked them to consider organizing a field, publishing an
anthology, starting a journal. And by the way, she added at the end, she'd like
to become the first professor in the United States with a specific position in
literature and the environment. Anyone interested?
Today, Cheryll Burgess Glotfelty says that "my beginning assumption was that something
we could call ecocriticism was possible, but we would
have to invent the field."
A few years
later, that effort is well under way. This spring the University of Georgia
Press published a survey of the field, The Ecocriticism
Reader, edited by Ms. Glotfelty and Harold Fromm,
an independent scholar. It is just one of many such books that publishers are
adding to their lists. From anthologies of nature writing such as The Norton
Book of Nature Writing (Norton, 1990) to books of literary criticism and
Garland Publishing's upcoming Environmental Literature: An International
Handbook, environmental literature is hot.
Taking
Notice
In 1992 scholars
founded the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (known as ASLE), and it now boasts some 900 members. There's a
journal--ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment--as
well as The American Nature Writing Newsletter (just renamed ASLE News), and an active e-mail discussion list (asle@unr.edu). And yes, Ms. Glotfelty
is a professor of literature and the environment at the University of Nevada at
Reno, an institution fast becoming a center for ecocriticism.
At the same
time, the rest of literary criticism is taking notice. Journals such as The
North Dakota Quarterly, The Indiana Review, The Georgia Review, and others have
published special issues on literature and the environment. This year, groups
that meet annually to discuss the literature of Faulkner and Hemingway have
adopted the natural world as their theme.
Still,
nobody is willing to pin down just what ecocriticism
is. Very broadly, scholars say that it adds place to the categories of race,
class, and gender used to analyze literature. For some, that means looking at
how texts represent the physical world; for others, at how literature raises
moral questions about human interactions with nature. Some critics are
resurrecting forgotten texts of nature writing, bringing them into the
classroom and scholarly discussion; others are using post-modern literary theory
to analyze them. Ecofeminists are looking at the way
representations of nature are influenced by gender; environmental activists are
pointing to the ways in which literature addresses ecological problems.
"Green
Cultural Studies"
Scholars
call the emerging field "green cultural studies," "environmental
literary criticism," "the natural history of reading." "The
fact that we can't agree on a name is a sign of the incredible diversity in ecocriticism," says John Elder, a professor of English
and environmental studies at Middlebury College. "It's a free-for-all, and
that's exciting."
The
diversity stems at least in part from the different routes that literary
critics have traveled to ecocriticism. Some literary
critics see their role as raising public awareness of environmental issues.
Many of these scholars were environmental activists before they become ecocritics.
Avid backpackers
have transferred their love of the outdoors to appreciation of its depiction in
literature. Others have responded to the growing interest among literary
scholars in studying non-fiction. Perhaps most important, scholars have been
galvanized by the contemporary renaissance in nature writing among such authors
as Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and many more.
A number of
literary critics also say that ecocriticism
represents a reaction to the heady theorizing of the 1980s and 90s. They
jokingly call themselves "compoststructuralists,"
to differentiate themselves from poststructuralists and to emphasize the, um,
earthiness of their approach.
"For a
long time, the focus of literary studies was on the world of words," says
Lawrence Buell, a professor of English at Harvard University. From new critics
in the 1950s, who thought that texts could be analyzed on their own terms,
without reference to the context in which they were produced, to recent
theorists who have argued that language never accurately reflects reality,
"there's been a gap between texts and facts," Mr. Buell says.
"But
now there's a recoil: Ecocriticism assumes that there
is an extratextual reality that impacts human beings
and their artifacts--and vice versa."
Not surprisingly,
diversity breeds controversy. When Jay Parini wrote
an article on the new field for The New York Times Magazine last year, he says
that he got over 100 letters--most of them angry.
"People
said that I'd neglected the feminists or ignored the theorists," says Mr. Parini, a professor of English at Middlebury.
"Everybody seems to think that they started ecocriticism."
The Use
of Theory
One of
today's biggest debates is over the use of theory. Scholars such as Glen A.
Love, who has just retired as a professor of English at the University of
Oregon, argue that ecocriticism needs to leave
postmodernism behind. Environmental studies began in the life sciences and then
broadened out to the humanities, Mr. Love says, but the two parts of the field
still interact very little.
"As a
literary scholar, it embarrasses me to listen to colleagues who see science as
just a bunch of cultural stories or who talk about nature writing without
knowing very much about nature," he says. "It's time to heal the
breach between the hard sciences and the humanities--and literary theory isn't
going to do it."
Nevertheless,
a number of scholars combine theory and ecocriticism.
In The Ecocriticism Reader, one essay draws on the
theories of Michel Foucault and Edward Said to demonstrate that the environment
is a cultural construct that, for example, ascribes feminine characteristics or
prevailing definitions of innocence to nature.
"It's a
big debate, but I suspect that a lot of people--like myself--are
eclectics," says Mr. Buell. "I sympathize with the view that a stone
is a stone, and no amount of literary theory can change that. But I've also
learned from contemporary theory that we have to watch it when we move from
stone to text. No text can exactly mirror the non-human world."
A related
debate focuses on whether ecocriticism is compatible
with feminist theorizing and analysis. Clearly, ecofeminism is an up-and-comer,
with its own special issue of ISLE in the works and numerous anthologies of
women nature writers already published.
Reflections
of Gender
Yet Louise
H. Westling, a professor of English at the University
of Oregon, worries that by emphasizing the way gender is reflected in
depictions of the landscape, ecofeminism reinforces a long-standing tradition of
assuming that the land is female and the people who affect it male.
"That's absurd. The land is not a woman. But from ancient times, writers have used feminine images to justify conquering it," says Ms. Westling. Academic analysis sometimes jars on environmental activism.
What is
Nature?
"A lot of ecocritics thought that kind of
analysis academicized the discussion in ways that
debunked the efforts of conservationists and could be manipulated by
developers," says Scott Slovic, editor of ISLE
and director of the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities at the
University of Nevada at Reno.
Other
questions abound:
What is
nature--and where does one find it? The Association for the Study of Literature
and Environment started at a meeting of the Western Literature Association, and
some of the most prominent departments in ecocriticism
are in the West--at Reno, the University of Oregon, the
University of California at Davis. Perhaps as a result, a lot of ecocriticism has focused on Western literature. But Mr.
Tallmadge, a professor of literature at Cincinnati's Union Institute, asks:
"Do you have to just read John Muir and his encounters with the Sierras?
Can't you read John Updike on the city and talk about place and location in
terms of urban environments?"
What is
nature writing? Traditionally, scholars have thought of it as the non-fiction
essay popularized by Thoreau, a blend of scientific observation and
self-analysis. But the writer Annie Dillard recently set off a furor on ASLE's e-mail network when she confessed to a writing
seminar that she had made up a number of descriptions and incidents in her
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which describes her life in a valley of Virginia's
Blue Ridge Mountains. If you can't trust a nature writer, some scholars asked, who can you trust? Nevertheless, a number of scholars are
calling for a broadened definition of nature writing, one that includes poetry and fiction.
Are nature
writing and ecocriticism a middle-class preserve? Most critics would say Yes. So far, nature writing and
the scholarly discussion of it have centered primarily in Europe and North
America, attracting people who have the leisure and money to go out and enjoy
nature. But some literary critics say they should study how other
traditions--for example, the oral stories of American Indians--represent
nature. Moreover, scholars such as Mr. Slovic are
trying to spread ecocriticism abroad: While on a
Fulbright fellowship to Japan a few years ago, he helped establish ASLE-Japan, which now boasts more than 100 members. This
month the group is sponsoring an international symposium in Hawaii on Japanese
and American nature writing.
Do nature
writers and the ecocritics who study them take themselves
a bit too seriously? A number of literary critics are experimenting with nature
narratives, blending their personal experiences, for example in the woods of
Maine, together with their readings of poets such as Robert Frost, who
described those locations.
The Western
writer C.L. Rawlins recently poked fun at this kind
of introspection in an article in The Bloomsbury Review, dubbing it "the
gentle thunder of a well-beaten breast." "Sitting at the desk with
PowerBook, herb tea, and a stack of index cards, one suddenly realizes that
upon reaching that farthest, highest peak, instead of eating a sandwich one in
fact saw God," he wrote.
"Do we
always have to come back to ourselves?" asks Oregon's Ms. Westling. "Surely nature writers and ecocritics ought to be looking for a less androcentric
approach."
A Scathing Satire
Outside
of ecocriticism, the reaction to the field is mixed.
Mr. Parini's New York Times article provoked a
scathing satire in The Washington Post. Jonathan Yardley, a Post columnist,
echoed the thoughts of some English professors when he dubbed ecocritics "just another passel of academics who've figured out how to turn the classroom into a
political forum."
Some among
the ranks of literature's theorists also voice qualms. Donald E. Pease, a professor
of English at Dartmouth College, worries that "the turn to nature can
spawn an attitude of rugged individualism that is escapist and narrow. It still
needs to be affiliated with other kinds of emancipatory literary
practice."
Indeed, in
some ways ecocriticism still hasn't quite broken into
the mainstream. Phyllis Franklin, executive director of the Modern Language
Association, says that preliminary plans for the association's next annual
meeting show few sessions in the field. She adds, however,
that "I do know people working on books that will appear in the
academic marketplace in the future. That's when this approach will have more of
an impact."
Scholars
such as Harvard's Mr. Buell say that "the worst
thing that could happen would be for ecocriticism to
become just another branch of literary criticism. I would hope that we
could continue to have meetings where smart dropouts and backpackers talk to
tenured professors."
What is ecocriticism ?
1. it adds place to the categories of race, class, and gender used to analyze literature.
2. that means looking at how texts represent the physical world;
3. at how literature raises moral questions about human interactions with nature.
4. resurrecting forgotten texts of nature writing,
4.1 bringing them into the classroom and
4.2 scholarly discussion;
5. using post-modern literary theory to analyze texts.
6. Ecofeminists are looking at the way representations of nature are influenced by gender;
7. environmental activists are pointing to the ways in which literature addresses ecological problems.
ecological literacy, defining the term
ecological terms and their meaning
Using this article in your writing.
Key Works, Recent Books, and Anthologies in Ecocriticism
Sisters of the
Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature, edited by Lorraine Anderson
(Vintage, 1991)
Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, by Jonathan Bate (Routledge, 1991)
The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the
Formation of American Culture, by Lawrence Buell (Harvard University Press,
1995)
Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature, by John Elder (University
of Illinois Press, 1985)
The Norton Book of Nature Writing, edited by Robert Finch and John Elder (W.W. Norton
& Company, 1990)
The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary
Ecology,
edited by Cheryll Glotfelty
and Harold Fromm (University of Georgia Press, 1996)
Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of
Mind, by
Karl Kroeber (Columbia University Press, 1994)
This Incomperable Lande:
A Book of American Nature Writing, edited by Thomas J. Lyon (Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1989)
The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology, by Joseph W. Meeker
(Scribner's, 1972)
Wilderness and the American Mind, by Roderick Frazier Nash (third edition, Yale
University Press, 1982)
Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature, by Vera Norwood
(University of North Carolina Press, 1993)
The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology, by Max Oelschlaeger (Yale University Press, 1991)
Pilgrims to the Wild: Everett Ruess, Henry
David Thoreau, John Muir, Clarence King, Mary Austin, by John P. O'Grady (University of Utah Press,
1993)
Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie
Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, by Scott Slovic (University of Utah Press, 1992)
The Practice of the Wild, by Gary Snyder (North Point Press, 1990)
The
Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction, by Louise H. Westling (University of Georgia Press, 1996)
This article was at: http://www.asle.org/site/resources/ecocritical-library/intro/embark/
