Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Simon C. Estok, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1095-1096.

THE BULK OF the "ecocriticism" being done restricts itself to American nature writing. For most people, this does not seem to be a problem. At some point, though, we have to acknowledge what ecocriticism's xenophobia will mean for the field. Equating nature studies and ecocriticism is a dangerous practice that runs the risk of leading us into thematic criticism of the traditional, baldly detached sort that many of us were reared on in our undergraduate programs--thematic criticism, though, that is all dressed up in a flashy and fashionable new outfit, criticism that underneath the fluff is really the same old tedious rubbish, criticism that does not promise to get us far in changing the way we think about the world in which we live.

Until Cheryll Glotfelty's 1996 The Ecocriticism Reader, ecocriticism had no real home, no real identity, and was an area of study not "recognized as belonging to a distinct critical school or movement." Instead, as Glotfelty points out, ecocritical voices appeared under headings as varied "as American Studies, regionalism, pastoralism, the frontier, human ecology, science and literature, nature in literature, landscape in literature," and so on (xvi-xvii).

While it was possible in 1996 to say that the English literary profession was not responding in any significant way to the issue of the environment, such is no longer the case--witness, for instance, this PMLA Forum. The Ecocriticism Reader was a major step toward organizing the field and bringing literary studies into closer contact with what is generally recognized as a contemporary crisis, but ecocriticism needs to continue taking steps. For this to happen, we need to ask ourselves a number of questions.

What goals and definitions, for example, do we envision for ecocriticism? What counts as ecocriticism? What is ecofeminism? Are they different? Can a person practice one and not the other? How far can ecocriticism go from "nature" and still be ecocriticism? What can discussions about texts that are silent on nature give us? Can someone such as Shakespeare fit into all this? How? How serious are we about making connections? Do these connections extend to our personal lives? Does practicing ecocriticism (and feminism) demand something that moves beyond mere academic interest, toward a kind of personal and political commitment that other theories don't demand? Can a man who stuffs dollar bills in women's underwear at strip clubs by night be a feminist critic by day? Can a person who chows down on a fat roast beef on rye at lunch be an ecocritic at the two o'clock seminar? Why bother with ecocriticism? Are there revealing links between environmentally and socially oppressive systems, overlapping and interlocking structures that need to be examined? How far can we go with avoiding anthropocentrism? When Lawrence Buell says in The Environmental Imagination that we ought to "relinquish the superintending human consciousness" completely in our work (164), just how are we to accomplish this task in such an eminently human area as writing?

Literary critical interest in the natural environment is nothing new, but for far too long questions about the relation between social and environmental issues in texts outside the genre of nature writing have been kept in separate theoretical circles. This is particularly apparent with Shakespeare.

There is no shortage of books and articles that look at the representations of natural environments in Shakespeare. In general, these studies fall into two general categories: the formalist camp and what we might call the protoecocritical group. The formalists have examined birds, plants (especially flowers), gardens, the relation between nature (as a general theme) and genre, the way the natural environment could be seen to fit into cosmic patterns, and so on. The difference between this group and the protoecocritical one is in the kinds of analyses undertaken. While the former is structuralist (concerned primarily with enumerating thematic clusters, with comparing them, with trying to get idealist pictures of the English Renaissance, and so on), the latter is poststructuralist in its various theoretical discussions of the ways that thinking and talking about the natural world interrelate with other early modern discourses. Jeanne Addison Roberts has analyzed the evolution of Shakespeare's ideas about the wild in a largely formalist attempt to expose metaphoric linkages between Shakespeare's writing of women and of the natural world. John Gillies elegantly maps the coordinates linking geographic difference with social exclusion and otherness; Richard Marienstras, a proto-new historicist, tries to unearth early modern environmental laws, the background against which Shakespeare wrote. Linda Woodbridge looks at interconnected representations of land and body, penetration and pollution, at how sexualized landscapes form part of semiotic systems she calls "the discourse of fertility," and at ways that this discourse overlaps and interacts with discourses of magic.

Indeed, a lot has been written about the environment in Shakespeare, but none of it is properly ecocritical, ecologically revolutionary, or explicitly geared toward effecting change in the way we think about and produce the environment. While much of the work, both from the protoecocritics and from the formalists and structuralists, is useful, it is clear that there is much work yet to be done in ecocriticism.

Almost all ecocritical work is conducted in texts that have what Lawrence Buell calls "environmentally focused perspectives" (430n20). I have no interest in belittling or criticizing the project of recouping professional dignity for what Glotfelty called "the undervalued genre of nature writing" (xxxi); rather, I think it is important for all literary scholars to take the environment seriously, to see it as vital, to bother with the ways that we conceptualize and speak about (or are silent about) the natural environment. Otherwise, ecocriticism will just be one of those trends that temporarily guarantee an audience, publications, tenure, promotions, and so on. It won't change things.

SIMON C. ESTOK
Chungwoon University