Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

"Place and Narrative Scholarship in Ecocriticism"

by Michael Branch

Questions regarding the usefulness and legitimacy of storytelling in ecocritical scholarship seem to me to revolve around the idea of place and our changing conceptions of the ways in which the experience of place bears upon our work as writers, teachers, and critics. As scholars of literature and the environment, the stories we integrate into our practice will likely be stories of places: places that have educated, moved, or disciplined us; places that have inspired the literary art to which we are devoted; places our culture has celebrated, sanctified, repudiated, saved, transformed, or lost. The ubiquity of the locution "sense of place" (certainly the vaguest term in our critical lexicon) suggests the centrality of this engagement with place, and may help explain why storytelling in ecocriticism is so valuable and so problematic.

The importance of "sense of place" to our work as ecocritics begs the question of how our own sense of place should influence the work we do. I think of my students' often skeptical responses to Henry Thoreau's experiment at Walden: either his pastoral retreat to the pond is viewed as escapist, or the fact that he visited Concord regularly is considered hypocritical. I fear that storytelling ecocritics walk a similarly narrow and perilous way: if we do not include stories of our own encounters with the land, we may be considered unqualified exponents of a literature that celebrates the land; conversely, the telling of too many such stories may cause us to be judged enthusiasts whose highly subjective engagement with the natural world would find better expression in a discipline less critical than literary studies.

I see several reasons why the storytelling scholar is likely to encounter skepticism. First, storytelling depends upon subjective "senses" (including the "sense of place") and must therefore remain under suspicion in a discipline that continues to accept a positivist scientific model as its standard for scholarship. Second, the combination of personal engagement and environmental concern inherent in such storytelling may be political in a sense that is perceived as being at odds with good scholarship. Third, it may be feared that the scholar's stories are offered instead or at the expense of those other "stories," the literary texts we are presumably paid to elucidate. Finally, the places we often celebrate in our stories are rarely accorded the status of cultural monuments; unlike the art historian who visits the Louvre or the Egyptologist who travels to Gizeh, the ecocritic who makes a pilgrimage to a prairie or mountain will be seen as a tourist rather than a scholar unless there is a manuscript collection or academic conference at the destination in question.

In The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), J. Nicholas Entrikin comments that "what distinguishes current work in [place studies] from more traditional studies is the greater willingness to move beyond traditional 'facts' of place to examine the more subjective experience of place" (133). It is this genuine, unmediated experience of place that we often seek to convey through story. When executed with balance and sensitivity, narrative scholarship (or "personal criticism," or "autobiographical scholarship," as versions of the same enterprise have been called before) clearly enhances the integrity, depth, and authenticity of our engagement with literature. Ecocritics are students of literary texts, but we are also cultural cartographers who attempt to map those texts onto the landscapes which inspire them. Scholars with intimate knowledge of the places within and beneath the words have stories worth telling, and a standard of scholarship that rejects such stories does so to its own detriment.

Michael Branch, University of Nevada, Reno