Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Ursula K. Heise, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1096-1097.

TO THOSE OUTSIDE ecocriticism, this new area of study often seems defined as a subfield of American literature: a narrow canon of nature writing, mostly in prose, from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by such authors as Emerson, Thoreau, Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey. Sometimes a few poets--Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry--are included, and, more rarely, Native American literature is mentioned. To those of us who approach ecocriticism from a comparatist perspective, this characterization resembles one of those cartoon posters meant to satirize regional parochialism, which show local landmarks in monumental size but national and international ones either in diminutive size or not at all.

The comparatist's perspective on ecocriticism could be outlined with three statements that are less provocative than they may appear. First, ecocriticism has nothing specifically to do with American literature. This means, of course, not that ecocriticism does not or should not deal with American literature but that it is not in principle more closely linked to American than to any other national or regional literature. Western Europe and Latin America have long traditions of nature writing, as do Chinese and Japanese literature, to name only a few examples. Just what is meant by nature in these different cultural traditions is the first question the comparatist ecocritic investigates: some cultures see nature most clearly manifested in wilderness untouched by humankind, but for others nature includes cultivated rural areas, and in yet other cases it also encompasses a historical heritage of monuments and buildings. By the same token, the literary language available for writing about nature in a particular culture differs vastly depending on historical circumstance: whereas American poets who began to concern themselves with environmental issues in the 1960s and 1970s could look back on a long national tradition of writing about the natural and the local, German poets in the same period had to grapple with the prior Nazi appropriation of such natural symbols as the forest and the oak and had to invent a new kind of nature writing divorced from fascism. Ecocriticism examines, in other words, how concepts of the natural are constructed in different cultures and expressed through a variety of literary practices.

Second, ecocriticism has nothing specifically to do with nature writing. Again, this does not imply that ecocriticism does not ever deal with nature writing; clearly, it often does. But to suggest that it deals with nothing else is comparable to claiming that feminism is only applicable to texts by or about women. Ecocriticism analyzes the ways in which literature represents the human relation to nature at particular moments of history, what values are assigned to nature and why, and how perceptions of the natural shape literary tropes and genres. In turn, it examines how such literary figures contribute to shaping social and cultural attitudes toward the environment. In this project, nature writing has a role to play as one particular way of figuring the natural, but there are many others--in fact, no genre is in principle exempt from this kind of analysis. To give just one example, one of the contemporary genres in which questions about nature and environmental issues emerge most clearly is science fiction: from the novels and short stories of Brian Aldiss, John Brunner, and Ursula K. Le Guin in the 1960s and 1970s to those of Carl Amery, David Brin, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Scott Russell Sanders in the 1980s and 1990s, science fiction is one of the genres that have most persistently and most daringly engaged environmental questions and their challenge to our vision of the future.

Last, ecocriticism has nothing specifically to do with nature writing. Again, this statement in no way denies the value of ecocriticism's engagement with literature, in which I am myself involved. But ecocriticism is not limited to literature: it has for a considerable time been a highly interdisciplinary field with research not only on written texts but also on different media, such as photography and the documentary film, and in other disciplines, such as history, art history, anthropology, and philosophy. A considerable amount of this work reaches far beyond the boundaries of American culture. The body of scholarship in these branches of ecocriticism is vast---dauntingly vast, in fact, although many literary critics may not yet be aware of it. No doubt, ecocriticism's first task must be to make at least a part of this rich array of cross-cultural scholarship available to the discipline at large.

URSULA K. HEISE
Columbia University