Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Patrick D. Murphy, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1098-1099.

REGARDING ENVIRONMENTAL LITERATURE and ecological literary criticism, I want to comment first on the way this movement arose from the social concerns of teachers and students as have other critical movements in literary studies over the last forty years. What perhaps distinguishes ecocriticism from these other movements, such as feminism, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism, without setting it apart from them, is that it has altered the gestalt by which characters, readers, and authors are understood in relation to the rest of the world. While feminism, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism are focused on extending equitable moral considerability and social justice to excluded, exploited, and oppressed peoples, ecocriticism--like the various forms of ecology on which it is invariably, although somewhat tenuously, based--extends that considerability to nonhuman nature (at the same time, the relation between ecocriticism and these other movements is being developed through ecofeminism, environmental justice, and multicultural ecocriticism). Environments are no longer limited to an understanding of setting, nor are character and authorial attitudes about the environment limited to narrative development; they are seen instead as a fundamental feature of the ideological horizons of literary works.

Like the other socially based critical movements identified in the preceding paragraph, ecocriticism is altering our conception of the criteria we should use in defining literary canons. Not only authors and texts but also genres and the very concept of a national literature are affected. In addition, ecocriticism is undertaking a rethinking of the relative merits of the works that compose the oeuvre of already canonical authors, such as Cather, Hemingway, and Faulkner in the United States; of Welsh and Scottish poets in the United Kingdom; and of the German Romantics, particularly those associated with fantasy writing. Two recently published works contributing to this reassessment are American Nature Writers (2 vols.) and Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook. The reconsideration of canon, then, is an international phenomenon.

Although much of the early ecocriticism focused on American and British writers, particularly essayists and the Romantic poets, ecocriticism has increasingly broadened its purview by developing both a working relation with poststructuralist theories and a knowledge of international literature. Essays comparing the work of the American poet Gary Snyder with that of the Japanese novelist and poet ISHIMURE Michiko, ecocritical analyses of Caribbean writers across languages and nationalities, comparative analyses of nature in Latin American poetry, and cross-national studies of environmental fiction in the Caribbean, Africa, and Japan, all appearing this year in such journals as Studies in the Humanities, the Hispanic Journal, and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, attest to the rapid internationalization of this field of literary criticism. Besides redefining the idea of comparative literary analysis, ecocritics who conduct such analyses are researching an interdisciplinarity of interests unprecedented in literary studies.

Often literary ecocriticism relies not only on the insights of literary studies to analyze fictional and nonfictional prose, poetry, and drama but also on those of environmental studies, environmental history, postmodern geography, neurobiology, cognitive rhetoric, and a host of other related disciplines. Along with this type of interdisciplinarity, we are witnessing ecocriticism's alliance with multicultural studies and postcolonial studies, particularly in the arena of environmental justice; for example, a bioregional activist participating in the defense of the autonomous village of Tepoztlan in Mexico has written about the inspiration he finds in the prose and poetry of Gary Snyder, and international nature literature is published as a regular section, "Arts and the Natural Environment," of the journal Organization and Environment, which is edited at a college of business.

Although ecocriticism is not a new movement--one can think, for instance, of F. O. Matthiessen's inclusion of Thoreau in American Renaissance or a text such as Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden--the offering of courses in it did not expand significantly until the 1970s. Now, in the 1990s, literary criticism is finally catching up and teaching such texts, primarily as a result of the founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, which in turn has led to the interest of a good number of academic presses in establishing series for the publication of nature literature and ecocriticism. Certainly not everyone needs to become an ecocritic, but every department in which MLA members hold tenure ought to include an ecocritic among its ranks, if only to respond to the interests and needs of undergraduate and graduate students. At the undergraduate level, this appointment would enable literature departments to link up with other departments, as in environmental education programs and programs such as the BA in Nature and Culture at the University of California, Davis. And the degree of interest at the graduate level can easily be measured by the number of dissertations being completed in this field.

PATRICK D. MURPHY
Indiana University of Pennsylvania