Introduction
Over
the past quarter-century ecological criticism has moved from the margins to an
increasingly prominent position in literary studies, yet it is still regarded
with suspicion in many corners of the discipline. While it has become second
nature for scholars to think critically about the way literary texts reflect
(or obscure) how which race, gender, sexuality, and nationality are constructed
and negotiated, the manner in which human beings navigate, alter, and adapt to
changes in their environment has not received the same level of scrutiny from
scholars in the humanities. Anxious to avoid endorsing any form of
environmental determinism with its sordid history of politicized and racialized
misuse, most literary scholars and historians have downplayed, ignored, or
denied the extent to which human history and culture has been shaped through
our interaction with our physical environment. At the same time, when humanists
(and literary scholars in particular) have ventured into the field of
“environmental studies,” our attempts have often been hindered by the fact that
we are quite literally speaking a different language from the scientists and
social scientists engaged in research and public policymaking surrounding
environmental issues. As anthropogenic climate change and other looming
ecological crises promise to shape our lived experience more dramatically and
unpredictably than ever before, the field of literary studies risks becoming
irrelevant to the most urgent challenges facing human civilization.
Analysis
The
growing number of empirical studies performed in ecology and evolution creates
a need for quantitative summaries of research domains to generate higher-order
conclusions about general trends and patterns. Recent developments In
meta-analysis (the area of statistics that is designed for summarizing and
analyzing multiple independent studies) have opened up new and exciting
possibilities. Unlike more traditional qualitative and narrative reviews,
meta-analysis allows powerful quantitative analyses of the magnitude of effects
and has a high degree of objectivity because it is based on a standardized set
of statistical procedures. The first pioneering applications in ecology and
evolution demonstrate that meta-analysis is both tractable and powerful.
Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences of the contemporary
environmental situation. Ecocriticism was officially heralded by the
publication come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible
solutions for the correction of two seminal works, both published in the mid-1990s: The
Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, and The
Environmental Imagination, by Lawrence Buell.
In
the United States, ecocriticism is often associated with the Association for the Study of Literature and
Environment
(ASLE) which hosts biennial meetings for
scholars who deal with environmental matters in literature. ASLE publishes a
journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)—in
which current American scholarship can be found.
Ecocriticism
is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other
designations, including "green (cultural) studies", "ecopoetics", and "environmental literary
criticism".
Evolution of ecocriticism in literary studies
Ecocritics investigate such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely, is meant by the word nature, and
whether the examination of "place" should be a distinctive category,
much like class, gender or race. Ecocritics examine human perception of wilderness, and how it has changed throughout history and whether or
not current environmental issues are accurately represented or even mentioned
in popular culture and modern literature. Other disciplines, such as history,
philosophy, ethics, and psychology, are also considered by ecocritics to be
possible contributors to ecocriticism.
William
Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism (Barry
240). In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled Literature and Ecology: An
Experiment in Ecocriticism. His intent was to focus on “the application of
ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” (Reprinted in The
Ecocritism Reader on p. 107)
Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been
publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of
environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no
organized movement to study the ecological/environmental side of literature,
these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of
different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies etc. British
Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal
critique of pastoral literature in 1973, The Country and the City, which
spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the
genre and its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear even though
Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine
ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.
Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The
Comedy of Survival (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later
to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy; that environmental
crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of
culture from nature, and elevation of the former to moral predominance. Such anthropocentrism is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose
moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the
science of animal ethology, Meeker asserts, shows that a "comic mode"
of muddling through and "making love not war" has superior ecological
value. In the later, "second wave" ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of
an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of
literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological and historical
critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.
As Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of
the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they
didn’t know that it existed…Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.”
Nevertheless, ecocriticism—unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms—failed to
crystallize into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so
in the USA in the 1990s
In
the mid-1980s, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a
genre, primarily through the work of the Western
Literature Association
in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre
could function. In 1990, at the University of
Nevada, Reno,
Glotfelty became the first person to hold an academic position as a professor
of Literature and the Environment, and UNR has retained the position it established
at that time as the intellectual home of ecocriticism even as ASLE has
burgeoned into an organization with thousands of members in the US alone. From
the late 1990s, new branches of ASLE and affiliated organizations were started
in the UK, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ), India
(OSLE-India), Taiwan, Canada and Europe.
Conclusion
In comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism,
there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims
of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing,
Romantic poetry, and canonical literature to take in film, television, theatre,
animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range
of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has borrowed methodologies
and theoretically informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary,
social and scientific study.
Glotfelty's
working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism
is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical
environment" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to
recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued
genre of nature writing" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’
... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment
conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20).
Simon
Estok noted in 2001 that “ecocriticism has distinguished itself, debates
notwithstanding, firstly by the ethical stand it takes, its commitment to the
natural world as an important thing rather than simply as an object of thematic
study, and, secondly, by its commitment to making connections” (“A Report Card
on Ecocriticism” 220).
More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to
Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the
study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that
is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function–thematic, artistic,
social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise–of the natural
environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other)
that contribute to material practices in material worlds” (“Shakespeare and Ecocriticism”
16-17). This echoes the functional approach of the cultural ecology branch of ecocriticism, which analyzes the analogies
between ecosystems and imaginative texts and posits that such texts potentially
have an ecological (regenerative, revitalizing) function in the cultural system
(Zapf, "Literary Ecology").
As
Michael P. Cohen has observed, “if you want to be an ecocritic, be prepared to
explain what you do and be criticized, if not satirized.” Certainly, Cohen adds
his voice to such critique, noting that one of the problems of ecocriticism has
been what he calls its “praise-song school” of criticism. All ecocritics share
an environmentalist motivation of some sort, but whereas the majority are
'nature endorsing' (as Kate Soper puts it in "What is
Nature?" (1998)), some are 'nature sceptical'. In part this entails a
shared sense of the ways in which 'nature' has been used to legitimise gender,
sexual and racial norms (so homosexuality has been seen as 'unnatural', for
example), but it also involves scepticism about the uses to which 'ecological'
language is put in ecocriticism; it can also involve a critique of the ways
cultural norms of nature and the environment contribute to environmental
degradation. Greg Garrard has dubbed 'pastoral ecology' the notion that nature
undisturbed is balanced and harmonious ("Ecocriticism" 56-58), while
Dana Phillips has criticised the literary quality and scientific accuracy of
nature writing in "The Truth of Ecology". Similarly, there has been a
call to recognize the place of the Environmental
Justice movement
in redefining ecocritical discourse (see Buell, "Toxic Discourse").
In response to the question of what ecocriticism is or
should be, Camilo Gomides has offered an operational definition that is both
broad and discriminating: "The field of enquiry that analyzes and promotes
works of art which raise moral questions about human interactions with nature,
while also motivating audiences to live within a limit that will be binding
over generations" (16). He tests it for a film (mal)adaptation about
Amazonian deforestation. Implementing the Gomides definition, Joseph Henry
Vogel makes the case that ecocriticism constitutes an "economic school of
thought" as it engages audiences to debate issues of resource allocation
that have no technical solution.
Simon
Estok noted in 2001 that “ecocriticism has distinguished itself, debates
notwithstanding, firstly by the ethical stand it takes, its commitment to the
natural world as an important thing rather than simply as an object of thematic
study, and, secondly, by its commitment to making connections” (“A Report Card
on Ecocriticism” 220).
More
recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies,
Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or
natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to
effecting change by analyzing the function–thematic, artistic, social,
historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise–of the natural environment,
or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute
to material practices in material worlds” (“Shakespeare and Ecocriticism”
16-17). This echoes the functional approach of the cultural
ecology branch of ecocriticism, which analyzes the analogies between
ecosystems and imaginative texts and posits that such texts potentially have an
ecological (regenerative, revitalizing) function in the cultural system (Zapf,
"Literary Ecology").
As Michael P. Cohen has observed, “if you want to be an
ecocritic, be prepared to explain what you do and be criticized, if not
satirized.” Certainly, Cohen adds his voice to such critique, noting that one
of the problems of ecocriticism has been what he calls its “praise-song school”
of criticism. All ecocritics share an environmentalist motivation of some sort,
but whereas the majority are 'nature endorsing' (as Kate Soper
puts it in "What is Nature?" (1998)), some are 'nature sceptical'. In
part this entails a shared sense of the ways in which 'nature' has been used to
legitimise gender, sexual and racial norms (so homosexuality has been seen as
'unnatural', for example), but it also involves scepticism about the uses to
which 'ecological' language is put in ecocriticism; it can also involve a
critique of the ways cultural norms of nature and the environment contribute to
environmental degradation. Greg Garrard has dubbed 'pastoral ecology' the
notion that nature undisturbed is balanced and harmonious
("Ecocriticism" 56-58), while Dana Phillips has criticised the
literary quality and scientific accuracy of nature writing in "The Truth
of Ecology". Similarly, there has been a call to recognize the place of
the Environmental Justice movement in
redefining ecocritical discourse (see Buell, "Toxic Discourse").
In
response to the question of what ecocriticism is or should be, Camilo Gomides
has offered an operational definition that is both broad and discriminating:
"The field of enquiry that analyzes and promotes works of art which raise
moral questions about human interactions with nature, while also motivating
audiences to live within a limit that will be binding over generations"
(16). He tests it for a film (mal)adaptation about Amazonian deforestation. Implementing
the Gomides definition, Joseph Henry Vogel makes the case that ecocriticism
constitutes an "economic school of thought" as it engages audiences
to debate issues of resource allocation that have no technical solution.
References
Barry, Peter. "Ecocriticism". Beginning
Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed.
Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental
Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture.
Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Buell, Lawrence. "Toxic Discourse." Critical
Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 639-665 .
Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World:
Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA
and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.
Cohen, Michael P. “Blues in Green: Ecocriticism
Under Critique.” Environmental History 9. 1 (January 2004): 9-36.
Coupe, Lawrence, ed. The Green Studies Reader:
From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2000.
Cranston, CA. & Robert Zeller, eds. "The
Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers". New York: Rodopi,
2007.
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