Forum on Literatures of the Environment

Lawrence Buell, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1090-1092.

ALTHOUGH THE STUDY of literature in relation to physical environment dates back almost as far as literary criticism itself, only in the 1990s has it assumed the proportions of a movement, with its own professional organization, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE, numbering some 750 members worldwide), and its own journal (ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment). An increasing number of scholarly journals in diverse fields are receptive to its contributions (New Literary History's forthcoming special issue on ecocriticism is a recent example), and since 1995 a series of major professional conferences of increasingly international scope has been held. Considered qua movement, literature-and-environment studies (increasingly lumped under the semineologistic label "ecocriticism," however uneasy the unidoctrinalist imputation makes some practitioners, including me, feel) is thus indisputably a more coordinated venture than, say, the ethical turn in literary studies reviewed in the January 1999 PMLA. Yet at the same time it is more like such prior critical insurgencies as feminist, ethnic, and gay revisionisms than like New Critical formalism, deconstruction, and new historicism, in that literature-and-environment studies takes its energy not from a central methodological paradigm of inquiry but from a pluriform commitment to the urgency of rehabilitating that which has been effectively marginalized by mainstream societal assumptions. As such, the phenomenon of literature-and-environment studies is better understood as a congeries of semioverlapping projects than as a unitary approach or set of claims.

These projects include the following, and more: (1) consideration of the possibilities of certain forms of scientific inquiry (e.g., ecology and evolutionary biology) and social scientific inquiry (e.g., geography and social ecology) as models of literary reflection; (2) textual, theoretical, and historical analysis of the platial basis of human experience; (3) study of literature as a site of environmental-ethical reflection--for example, as a critique of anthropocentric assumptions; (4) retheorization of mimesis and referentiality, especially as applied to literary representation of physical environment in literary texts; (5) study of the rhetoric (e.g., its ideological valences of gender, race, politics) of any and all modes of environmental discourse, including creative writing but extending across the academic disciplines and (indeed even more important) beyond them into the public sphere, especially the media, governmental institutions, corporate organizations, and environmental advocacy groups; and (6) inquiry into the relation of (environmental) writing to life and pedagogical practice. These and other ecocritical projects are being produced both separately and in combination, and by no means with one accord. The operative word here is liveliness, not consensus. Literature-and-environment studies are anything but unanimous, for example, on the sense in which literary texts can be said to render extratextual environments or on how--if at all--literary inquiry might be based on models taken from natural science or science studies.

Some of those associated with the movement would argue for the existence of an emerging ecocritical canon, the bibliography to The Ecocriticism Reader (ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm [Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996]) being the best-known endeavor to formulate an interim list of indispensable texts. I feel much more confident in asserting simply that literature-and-environment studies will surely keep burgeoning and gaining in critical maturity than I would in claiming that a canonical understanding of what form it should take has been attained. Indeed, if ecocriticism still lacks a paradigm-inaugurating statement like Edward Said's Orientalism (for colonial discourse studies) or Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (for new historicism), that may be just as well.

Several other dimensions of the literature-and-environment movement deserve special note. First, its "identitarian" aspect differs from that of all other critical insurgencies purporting to speak about or for marginalized others, insofar as the other in question appears to be centered to a greater extent outside the realms of human culture and the human body (though hardly disjunct from them!). Second, unlike all the critical movements mentioned above, literature-and-environment studies began qua movement outside the main centers of Euro-American academia, within the Western Literature Association (although a number of its chief advocates had been trained at leading American graduate schools). Third and semi-related, ecocriticism initially had and still to a considerable extent maintains a distinctly up-country-and-outback orientation, focusing strongly on rural and wilderness representation as against urban and metropolitan. Fourth, more than most prior late-twentieth-century critical insurgencies, the literature-and-environment movement has sought to break down the barrier between formal criticism and "creative" writing--for example, through emphasis on the informal, nontechnical essay as a mode for unfolding critical reflection simultaneously with personal narrative. Fifth, ASLE's membership was initially and to a considerable extent still is strikingly youthful (the median age of participants at the first national meeting, in 1995, was well under 35).

All five of these factors have provoked suspicion in some quarters. I read them much more hopefully, on balance. On the one hand, they do testify to certain parochialisms, especially during the movement's beginning, chief among which perhaps have been too selective emphases on anglophone and particularly United States writing, on country landscapes, on traditional conservationist or preservationist thinking at the expense of other environmental(ist) persuasions (particularly the environmental justice movement), and on modes of criticism excessively reactive against poststructuralist or cultural studies models instead of on direct constructive engagement. On the other hand, a certain hyperconcentration was, I think, necessary to get ecocriticism--like all critical movements--going: to give it energy, momentum, an edge of contrarian disaffection; and certain it is that literature-and-environment studies in 1999-2000, whatever the case a decade ago, has been growing and deparochializing fast. The inquiry has not yet acquired the standing as a humanistic subdiscipline presently accorded, for example, environmental history or environmental ethics. But it is only a matter of time before that takes place.

LAWRENCE BUELL
Harvard University