What is Ecocriticism?

 by Kent Ryden

Ecocriticism, and the texts upon which ecocritical scholars focus, provide perhaps the most clear and compelling means we have of literally grounding the study of literature in the vital stuff of life--the earth that surrounds and sustains us. The ecocritical stance reconnects literary study to both the processes and the problems inherent in living on this heavily burdened planet, focusing our attention anew on the ground beneath our feet, on our complex relationship to that ground, and on the implications of our behavior toward that ground; it removes literary scholarship from the realm of rarified word games, from the endlessly self-reflecting hall of mirrors that comprises so much of contemporary criticism and makes it matter in human affairs. As Wendell Berry has written, "To assume that the context of literature is 'the literary world' is, I believe, simply wrong. That its real habitat is the household and the community--that it can and does affect, even in practical ways, the life of a place--may not be recognized by most theorists and critics for a while yet. But they will finally come to it, because finally they will have to. And when they do, they will renew the study of literature and restore it to importance." [1]

I began my graduate studies in a conventional English program, but quickly became restless. I was realizing that the way I was studying the texts I preferred to read had little relation to what I was really interested in: the subtle, complex manner in which people connect, individually and communally, to the landscapes and places that surround them every day. I have always been motivated by a naive belief that literature matters insofar as it derives from and reflects on human experience--and, as essayist Rockwell Gray reminds us, "All experience is placed experience"; all human experience, that is, literally "takes place." [2] To fully understand this aspect of experience--the daily, inevitable, deeply shaping relationship among people, the earth, and the life (broadly conceived) that the earth supports--requires more than the careful reading of words on a page. It demands that we listen to the stories that people tell about the land, that we examine how they shape and have shaped the land, that we get out there and get our hands dirty; it demands that we be folklorists, geographers, historians, landscape readers, students of material culture. In embracing an interdisciplinary approach, the ecocritical scholar recontextualizes literature in the physical, grounded circumstances of life and thought and action, circumstances of the sort that generate literature in the first place: as William Stafford has remarked, "All events and experiences are local, somewhere. And all enhancements of events and experiences--all the arts--are regional in the sense that they derive from immediate relation to felt life." [3] Through examining not only written expression but also human life, thought, and behavior as they relate to the physical and natural world around us with as many scholarly tools as we can bring to bear, we enrich our understanding of the works we study and ground our scholarship more firmly in the exigencies of daily human existence. Without this grounding, any scholarly endeavor, no matter its discipline, seems to me to lose its point.

When I began to realize all this, I jumped ship and swam over to the avowedly interdisciplinary field of American Studies. This is a course that, in some measure, I suggest we all take. Writings about nature and the landscape, and the interdisciplinary study of those writings, explore in its most basic form the intersection of art with the rhythms and textures of life on earth and, throughout that exploration, achieve a deeper resonance, raising fundamental ethical questions, demanding that we think carefully about how to live well and wisely. Criticism has no more important work than this.

Kent Ryden, University of Southern Maine

Notes
[1] Wendell Berry, "Writer and Region," in What Are People For? (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 84.

[2] Rockwell Gray, "Autobiographical Memory and Sense of Place," in Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, ed. Alexander Burrym (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 53.

[3] William Stafford, "Having Become a Writer: Some Reflections," Northwest Review 13.3 (1973), 92.