Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

Gretchen Legler, "Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism"

Although narrative scholarship is useful to ecocritics and popular among them it is by no means relevant only to ecocritics. In fact, let's not forget where it started--with feminist literary scholars who were frustrated with the objective, disembodied voice in literary criticism and who began to do "narrative scholarship" or "autobiographical criticism" partly as a mode of resistance--a challenge to the institution of academia. Some of the "poet-critics" (a term used by Olivia Frye in An Alchemy of Genres) whose examples we may use for guidance include Jane Tompkins, Olivia Frye and Frances Murphy Zauhar, Nancy Miller, Jane Gallop, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Nancy Mairs, Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks, and Susan Griffin. These practitioners of narrative scholarship have taken a lot of professional "heat" for writing about themselves in their theoretical work.

From the beginning there have been lines drawn between those who practice narrative scholarship and those who do the "real" thing. But, obviously, questions about the value and uses of narrative scholarship are ultimately questions about the value and uses of different knowledge claims. In ecocriticism we don't get any closer to the "real" truth about human relationships with nature by writing narrative scholarship or autobiographical criticism. What we do when we adopt these critical modes is we make evident another element--the complication of the writer's/scholar's subjective experience, which is normally camouflaged in "non narrative" scholarship. This is the most valuable thing about narrative scholarship--revealing the agent or author of the criticism--like drawing back the curtain on the Wizard of OZ. Revealing the agent of criticism makes it possible to add a whole new layer to the criticism itself--a discussion of the notion of experience as it relates to the idea of nature (nature as the source of material truth). In this way, every piece of narrative scholarship is a radical challenge to the critical establishment. Every piece of narrative scholarship is a challenge to Euro-American notions of objectivity, the self, knowledge and language.

Narrative scholarship implies the combination of personal narrative with literary criticism--the presence of the "I" as critic. Narrative scholarship, then, has something in common with creative nonfiction. Canadian writer Myrna Kostash has remarked that the most important aspect of creative nonfiction and what sets it apart from other forms of literature is that the "I" is present and accounted for and also accountable as a material political agent in the piece of writing and in the world. Creative nonfiction draws upon/demands a material or erotic intelligence in addition to an abstract intelligence. The same might be said for narrative scholarship.

Another important strength of narrative scholarship is that it develops a different relationship with "the text" than traditional literary scholarship. It assumes the political power of the text--both creative and critical. It assumes that stories about human relationships with the natural world make a difference in the way we act. Ecocritics who take narrative scholarship as their mode involve themselves in the moral realm.

Narrative scholarship is key in ecocriticism, if one of the things we are doing is calling into question the whole relationship of knowledge, of language and the self to nature and what is natural. Narrative scholarship, especially if it involves personal narrative, is about border crossing--crossing the line between writer and scholar, while also calling into question the entire net of relationships between the material and the abstract. The underlying premise of autobiographical criticism is that a scholar's critical eye is rooted in her political, social. erotic materiality. In narrative scholarship we make our influences visible and we use them as pivots around which we perform our criticism.

Gretchen Legler, University of Alaska, Anchorage (now at University of Maine, Farmington)