Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

Diane P. Freedman, "Embedded Stories: Ecocriticism and/as Autobiographical Scholarship"

At the ASLE session last year, Scott Slovic described the general field of ecocriticism as "the study of nature writing by way of any scholarly approach or, conversely, the scrutiny of ecological implications and human-nature relationships in any literary text." He also suggested (I'm paraphrasing here) ecocritics seek out and/or produce writing that partakes of the earth, of the senses, that speaks directly (thus saving paper and readers' energy!) through narrative. Ecocriticism might be above all a mode of writer-reader, writer-text, and writer-nature connection.

I have been working on and in a genre I've termed autobiographical criticism or cross-genre, alchemical writing that merges and recycles memory and interpretation, writer and scholar. A braided river of reader-response and feminist literary criticism, autobiographical stories, and creative writing, autobiographical scholarship may also be considered a branch of ecocriticism (or narrative ecocriticism a branch of it) for its focus on the situatedness of the critic or scholar.

One chapter in my first book (An Alchemy of Genres, 1992) is even entitled "The Ecology of Alchemy: Recycling, Reclamation, Transformation" [in texts by Marge Piercy, Tess Gallagher, Alice Walker, Susan Griffin, and Carol Ascher et al.]. I wrote then that my point was "not to catalog an exhaustive list of a poet's influences, but to show that Piercy [for example] not only transplants and coalesces many texts and voices in her work but suggests that fact in the imagery of growing things." I noted ecological practice as well as subject of these writings and extolled the virtues of readers responding "in kind." Later, I claimed that for "the other feminist poet-critics discussed ... the homespun, the homestead, and nature similarly conspire to form fertile ground for their communal feminist poetics and politics, their cross-genre work." I cited Diane Wakoski: "Perhaps one of the greatest contributions twentieth-century American women make to poetry is to refuse to let aestheticians and poets forget the body. The earth body, the goddess body, the seasons and cycles, the agrarian root which we must still have even in urban or post-urban culture" ("Bodily Fluent"). I accepted Adrienne Rich's injunction, "Begin with the material. Pick up again the long struggle against lofty and privileged abstraction" (Blood, Bread, and Poetry).

Surely these quotations suggest the ecocritical dimensions of a range of autobiographical writers and of my work on them. Elsewhere, I've written and spoken about such diverse texts as Melville's novel Moby-Dick and the film Free Willy in the context of my own life as a bi-coastal resident, mother of a toddler, and writer-teacher ("A Whale of a Different Color: Melville and the Movies"). The essay double dips, mixing not only story with criticism but autobiographical scholarship with ecocriticism, and the braided form is contagious; I've co-edited two collections in which scholars "read" their lives through their research and read their subject matter through their lives (The Intimate Critique; "Nexus"). Returning to New Hampshire from a summer visit to Seattle, thinking about this panel in Vancouver, I wrote:

I see the NW through the screen of the east, eye focusing on the blue heron at Edy's landing on Whidbey Island after seeing my own blue herons on the back-of-the-Mill-Pond swamp on which I live in NH; I notice the quality of water, the coldness of our northern seas east and west, the salt bite. My son dances in the foam, gets as dewy-eyed as I about leaving land or sea to which we've grown accustomed and instantly devoted. He likes to integrate the places he's been or we've been into the places he goes (I think of his tantrum this evening, when he forgot the Bonaire fish he intended to bring up to his climber on the hill in front of our house, by a triple pine tree: he loves things to remember persons and places by, will sleep with my hairband for remembrance--not rue, but baubles and wound rubber band).

Is "narrative scholarship" a sufficient term for an enterprise that, for me, began with poetic attention to the poetry of multi-"ethnic" feminist poet-critics? Although "narrative criticism" is an important way of characterizing the ecocritical/autobiographical-critical enterprise, a newcomer might be encouraged by a list of related terms and writers besides those already mentioned; hence, writings on location (Freedman and Frey, "Nexus"), personal criticism (Caws, Women of Bloomsbury), public criticism (Hesse, "Cultural Studies and the New Belletrism"), experimental critical writing or integrative writing, (Torgovnick, "Experimental Critical Writing"; Minnesota Review interview), personal essay (Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay), or, simply, the [belletristic] essay (see, especially, Atkins, Estranging the Familiar). As with ecocriticism, in any case, the ratio of personal narrative to more traditional analysis in any given piece of autobiographical scholarship varies with each experiment.

Why do many of us increasingly teach and write "stories of reading" (Steig, Stories of Reading) or of other academic enterprises? For a range of reasons: aesthetic (it's more pleasurable to read, more literary), political (it's more accessible, usable), epistemic (how we know is dependent upon who we are and with what narratives--our own and others--we come to others), self-expressive (if our histories and allegiances are multiple why not our compositions?), and psychological or pedagogic (students learn much by examining how and why they ask and conclude what they do, including learning to write more "naturally" and for a wider audience). Such a pedagogy is socially responsible in its mode of attention and in its future application: engaged, situated, accessible writing has more use-value in the world, especially one with a dismal academic job market.) Of course this list is incomplete and its categories blur . . .

Diane P. Freedman, University of New Hampshire