Survival Stories: Toward an Ecology of Literary Criticism

by Mark Schlenz

A few years ago a student said he had enrolled in my particular section of a 20th-century American Literature course because he had heard I was "into" the emerging field of ecocriticism. An environmental studies major taking an English course to fulfill breadth requirements, he explained how he looked forward to integrating personal intellectual interests and political commitments in what would otherwise be for him an "irrelevant course." Literary studies, he went on, were known to be dominated by "politically correct" emphases on issues of race, class, and gender--all hopelessly anthropocentric in his view. The project he proposed involved instead a biocentric application of "the environmental ethic" as an interpretive standard to a reading of Robert Frost's poem "The Woodpile."

Though I encouraged his enthusiasm, I also cautioned him to sharpen his definitions of what he understood the aims and methods of ecologically focused literary study to be: What did he mean by the environmental ethic? How would his interpretive strategy evade excesses he condemned in other critical discourses? How would his analysis aid our productive understanding of interrelations between literary activity and ecological concerns? I further suggested that he reread Aldo Leopold's articulation of the land ethic and also take a look at Raymond Williams' essay, "Ideas of Nature." Despite these and subsequent suggestions, the student's paper chastened my best hopes and confirmed my worst anxieties for the healthy survival of ecocriticism. Because, as the student insisted, the poem's narrator claims to know the inner thoughts of a small bird, Frost is an arrogant humanist. Because he admires the work of a wood-cutter, Frost is a flagrant utilitarian. In short, according to my erstwhile student, Frost's anthropocentric poem, because it violates the integrity of "the environmental ethic," is an offensive text deserving deletion in a biocentrically reformed canon.

Ecocriticism, as this incident illustrated for me, cannot be productively approached as simply another species of criticism competing for survival in the rarified habitat of academe. Rather, ecocritics should seek to transform academe by bringing it back into dynamic interconnection with worlds we all live in--inescapably social and material worlds in which issues of race, class, and gender inevitably intersect in complex and multi-faceted ways with issues of natural resource exploitation and conservation. As the emergence of contemporary ecofeminist and environmental justice movements demonstrate, human and natural resource exploitation are invariably linked through various and competing ideas of nature. In literary studies, the ecocritic's task should involve articulation and critical examination of these linkages as revealed in and by linguistic and textual practices. Joseph Meeker noted in The Comedy of Survival that humanity is a uniquely literate species and went on to ask whether--and how--the stories we tell will finally contribute to our survival or extinction. This, I believe, is still the central question ecocriticism must confront. Further, I believe this confrontation draws us into a cooperative rather than a competitive relation with other members of our discourse community as we seek to establish an ecology of literary criticisms that appreciates and integrates insights of various critical perspectives by contributing to each an indefatigable and guiding concern for the fate of our earth.

Mark Schlenz, University of California, Santa Barbara