Forum on Literatures of the Environment

 
Scott Slovic, "Letter," PMLA 114.5 (Oct. 1999): 1102-3.

I WOULD LIKE to propose that, in the future, PMLA special Forums be open to contributions not only from MLA members but also from the community of authors and scholars at large. The current invitation asks for letter writers to comment on "the growing importance and expanding scope of the fields of environmental literature and ecological literary criticism." There are many people in a good position to comment on these issues; however, in contacting several dozen leading practitioners during the past two months and encouraging them to contribute to the special forum, I have inadvertently gathered concrete evidence of something I've long suspected: avant-garde authors and critics do not always belong to the MLA. I would guess, too, that this is true not only of nature writers and ecocritics but also of literary rebels working on other topics and issues. If the purpose of a special Forum is to attract diverse and significant viewpoints, it seems counterproductive to limit statements to members of "the club."

It is now routine to complain that ecocriticism is the limited province of American literature scholars and, furthermore, that it is concerned only with contemporary literature and lacks theoretical sophistication. Even a quick survey of current ecocritical scholarship explodes these misperceptions. During the past two decades, it is true, there has been particular energy devoted to ecocriticism in the United States, but there is also a rapidly expanding international movement in this field. When I contacted Ken-ichi Noda, president of the Japanese branch of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and encouraged him to contribute to this special Forum, he apologized for not being an MLA member and then mentioned that, in recent years, many literary scholars in Japan have been asking, "What happened to Japanese society over the past 150 years, after the introduction of European and American social and cultural institutions to this country?" "This question," he continued, "leads scholars to explore modern Japanese literary history in terms of nature, while, on the other hand, they are trying to clearly define what is traditional and what is not." The most recent issue of the Tokyo-based literary journal Folio A (number 5) is devoted to studies of Japanese literature of nature. In my own capacity as editor of the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, I regularly receive submissions from countries as far-flung as Australia, Mexico, Malta, and Nigeria. And over the past year I've been in correspondence with ecocritics in China and Estonia. The notion that environmental literature is an exclusively Americanist subject holds little water.

Likewise, many critics are now using the lenses of ecocriticism to study pre-twentieth-century literary works and nonbelletristic forms of expression. And theoretical discourse, ranging from environmental justice to the science of ecology, thoroughly permeates the discipline. One prominent, recently retired ecocritic, unable to contribute to this special Forum because he has never been an MLA member, encouraged me to mention his recent ISLE article that urges literary scholars to pay more attention to evolutionary biology and to realize that "the opportunities for pioneering a new and scientifically valid theoretical basis for ecocriticism and for literary study as a whole may be more attractive than the fear that some of your colleagues will inch their chairs away from yours in faculty meetings" (Glen A. Love, "Science, Anti-science, and Ecocriticism," ISLE 6.1 [1999]: 78). Yet another non-MLA member invited me to allude to his forthcoming book on ecopoetry, which uses "Merleau-Ponty's notions of the flesh of the visible and the primacy of perception in the corporeal schema of the lived body as the starting point for all human experience" in responding to "the poststructural dualism that relegates nature to the immanence of a dissociated human mind and assumes a dualistic divorce of text and ecocontext."

When I hear colleagues disparage the "narrow focus" of ecocriticism and environmental literature, I think inevitably of a parenthetical line from section 51 of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: "(I am large, I contain multitudes.)." Likewise, ecocriticism is large and contains multitudes. There is no single, dominant worldview guiding ecocritical practice--no single strategy at work from example to example of ecocritical writing or teaching. Cheryll Glotfelty neatly defines ecocriticism as "the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (Glotfelty and Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader [Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996] xviii). When I am asked for a broad description of the field, I say that it is the study of explicitly environmental texts by way of any scholarly approach or, conversely, the scrutiny of ecological implications and human-nature relations in any literary text, even texts that seem, at first glance, oblivious of the nonhuman world. In other words, any conceivable style of scholarship becomes a form of ecocriticism if it's applied to certain kinds of literary works; and, on the other hand, not a single literary work anywhere utterly defies ecocritical interpretation, is off-limits to green reading. This is an important point, because I often find that, despite my best efforts and the efforts of colleagues throughout the world, many people continue to have a rather ungrounded and dismissive attitude toward ecocriticisin and environmental literature, as if ecocritics somehow represent merely a nostalgic, millennialist fad, a yearning to resurrect and reexplain a limited tradition of hackneyed pastoral or wilderness texts. I hope that this special Forum will be a first step toward educating PMLA readers about the breadth and vitality of this important field.

SCOTT SLOVIC
University of Nevada, Reno