Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

 SueEllen Campbell, "Narrative Scholarship"

I'd like to shift the terms a bit: to "personal criticism."

In my dissertation-and-then-book, I wrote fairly standard impersonal criticism--about a flamboyantly personal critic, Wyndham Lewis. I found him in his showiest moments entertaining; interesting in a purely left-brain way; intensely annoying; and, in the context of the rest of my life, deeply boring. I wanted my next work to call also on my body, my senses, my heart, what I thought mattered. I looked around me, saw my friend Phil Terrie shaping his scholarly career around a beloved landscape, and thought, Of course!

It was, appropriately, on the deck of Phil's Adirondack cabin that I started thinking about the ways my work in literary theory and my love of wild places might fit together. When I sat down to write about that thinking, an impersonal style seemed ridiculous: these ideas were mine, shaped by my life. Plus I'd already done academic writing and wanted something new. So I framed that essay in a pair of brief scenes, one on Phil's deck, and said goodbye to the pretense of impersonality. Suddenly writing looked like a lot more fun.

My own models? Lewis, I suppose, though I hate to admit it, he was such a jerk. Roland Barthes, certainly. The personal moments in other doers of sweeping theory--Levi-Strauss's autobiography; some of Walter Benjamin's essays. Early on I read Michael Cohen's Muir book and recognized a kindred impulse. His work always seems to me just far enough ahead of mine--in directions I'd like to try--to serve as both an encouragement and a challenge.

Not long ago I was dismayed to find myself assigned to teach our M.A. course in research methods: I'd never taken such a course, my library skills were obsolete, I didn't think I did real research. So I invited a dozen colleagues to come describe for us the messy reality of a recent project. What happened? Every one of them--the theorist, the biographer, the literary historian, the drama critic, the freelance journalist, the memoirist, the novelist--every one of them told us a story about a career, a story about how personal and scholarly lives evolve together, how scholarship and criticism are always informed by family, landscape, personal history, passion. How else would we gather the energy to keep doing this work?

In the context of recent literary theory, of course, these links are not surprising. The stance of objectivity retains little credibility. For years I've asked my theory students to identify the person--and the plot, imagery, characters, setting, themes--embedded in even the most abstruse and ism-y of articles. And then there's the constant annoyance of terms like "creative writing" and "creative nonfiction"--as though criticism didn't require creativity, as though thinking and creativity were mutually exclusive. All good writing is both creative and somehow personal; all of it has a place in the stories of a life; all of it tells stories. Why pretend otherwise?

For a time I wrote hybrids--personal frames around a fairly standard core. But this, too, began to seem easy, boring. Thus my latest big project, a book about being in wild places. I thought about the wilderness narratives I'd read, borrowed a structure from Roland Barthes, applied all the brain I could muster, set my memory to work, studied old photos, went hiking, got caught in lightning on a high ridge. Then I wrote a set of personal essays--ideas and scenes, the scent of sage, history and mountains, stories of my own life. It was both hard and fun, and my parents liked it.

SueEllen Campbell, Colorado State University