Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the natural environment. Ecocriticism was officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works, both published in 1996: "The Ecocriticism Reader", edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, and "The Environmental Imagination", by Lawrence Buell. Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad genre that is known by many names: "green cultural" "studies, ecopoetics", and "environmental literary criticism" are also popular monikers for this relatively new branch of literary criticism.

Ecocriticism as a branch of literary criticism

Ecocritics ask questions such as: What is the role of the landscape in this work? Are the underlying values of the text ecologically sound? What is "nature writing"? Indeed, what is meant by the word "nature"? Should the examination of "place" be a distinctive category, much like class, gender and race? What is our perception of wilderness, and how has this perception varied throughout history? Are current environmental issues accurately represented or even mentioned in our popular culture and in modern literature? Can the principles of ecology be applied to poetry? Does gender affect the way one perceives and writes about nature? How do corporations, U.S. government officials, advertising executives, and the charismatic hosts of televised nature shows differ in their perceptions, reactions and approaches to their respective views of "nature"? What can other disciplines—such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology—contribute? William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism. 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 “greener” side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies, and so on. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature, 'The Country and the City' (1973), which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre - its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear, for example - 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 latter 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 avers, shows that a 'comic mode' of muddling through and making love not war has superior ecological value. In 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-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.” (p.xvii) Nevertheless, the reasons why ecocriticism - unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms - failed to crystallise into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s, would be an interesting question for historical research.

In the mid-eighties, 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 functions as: a fillip to the regional literature in which it had prominence; a counterbalance to the mania for 'cultural constructionism' in the literary academy; and a moral imperative in the face of mounting environmental destruction. In 1990, at the University of Nevada in 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 organisation with thousands of members in the US alone. From the late 1990s, new branches of ASLE and affiliated organisations were started in the UK (ASLE-UK), Japan, Australia / New Zealand, India (OSLE), Taiwan, Canada (ALECC) and Europe (EASCLE).

Ecocriticism in the 21st Century

Defining Ecocriticism

By 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, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has pilfered 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).

In a 1999 contribution to the "PMLA", Simon C. Estok asks “What goals and definitions . . . do we envision for ecocriticism? What counts as ecocriticism?” (“Letter”, 1096). Estok notes 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).

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)) a few 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. 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".

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.

Discourse in Ecocriticism

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 has an official journal—"Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment" ("ISLE")—in which the most current scholarship in the rapidly evolving field of ecocriticism can often be found.

References

* 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. "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.
*Estok, Simon C. (2001). [http://www.asle.umn.edu/archive/intro/estok.html “A Report Card on Ecocriticism.”] "AUMLA" 96 (November): 200-38.
*Estok, Simon C. (1999). "Letter," Forum on Literatures of the Environment, "PMLA" 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1095-1096.
*Estok, Simon C. (2005). “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: An Analysis of ‘Home’ and ‘Power’ in King Lear.” "AUMLA" 103 (May 2005): 15-41.
*Garrard, Greg, "Ecocriticism". New York: Routledge, 2004.
*Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm (Eds). "The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology". Athens and London: University of Georgia, 1996.
*Gomides, Camilo. 'Putting a New Definition of Ecocriticism to the Test: The Case of The Burning Season, a film (mal)Adaptation". ISLE Vol. 13.1 Winter 2006 13-23.
*Meeker, Joseph W. "The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology." New York: Scribner's, 1972.
*Phillips, Dana. "The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America". Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
*Rueckert, William. "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism." "Iowa Review" 9.1 (Winter 1978): 71-86.
*Vogel, Joseph Henry. "Ecocriticism as an Economic School of Thought: Woody Allen's Match Point as Exemplary." OMETECA Science and Humanities Vol. XII 2008 105-119.
*Williams, Raymond. "The Country and the City." London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.