Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

Ian Marshall, "Why Ecocritics Tell Stories"

We tell stories because we have learned from our teaching to show as well as tell, to illustrate points with anecdotes, examples, experience, so that even the guys in the back of the class wearing backwards baseball caps will pay attention.

We tell stories because we believe in an ecology of reading, where literature, life, and theory are inter-penetrating, inter-dependent, inter-connected, a web, each strand informing and helping us understand the others, everything hitched to everything else.

We tell stories because we sense that literature is "equipment for living" (in Kenneth Burke's phrase) and also that our lives are equipment for understanding literature, and theory.

We tell stories because we enjoy our friends' bemused disbelief when we submit grant proposals for ecocritical "research" that involves a backpacking trip to Ktaadn in Thoreau's footsteps. We enjoy telling those friends that our next project will be a comparative study of beer in world literature.

We tell stories because we have to admit that there's a grain of truth, maybe a whole sheaf, in what an anonymous reviewer wrote in rejecting a grant proposal, wondering if we are seeking simply to get our vacation paid for. For we are idealists, and we believe that both our work and our play can take place in the same realm.

We tell stories even though our grant proposals are turned down because we tell stories.

We tell stories because we admire creativity and good writing, and not just from afar.

We tell stories because we are tired of the adversarial stance that permeates not just human relations with nature but the critic's relations with other critics and with readers, as if readers need to be conquered by superior logic, or contained in the critic's particular ideological box.

We tell stories because we like to roam, and ramble, and that's what essays are supposed to do (see Montaigne, follow his path, go over Montaigne and see what you can see), and we know that writing too is a kind of journey, an exploration, every story line a trail, and we welcome the companionship of readers.

We tell stories because we put into practice the post-structuralist, neohistoricist theory that all readings are situated and subjective. So we may as well reveal just where we are situated.

We tell stories because we see sense in the feminist argument that the personal is political. And the personal is more interesting.

We tell stories because they bring thoughts and theories back to earth.

We tell stories because, as Gary Paul Nabhan says, that's how environmental education traditionally has taken place, back when "Story had not yet been sequestered in books, nor had pertinent knowledge about the natural world been reduced to 'facts' ritually presented by members of a scientific priesthood."

At the same time, we tell stories because we are comfortable with science. admiring as we do writers who are conversant with it, who neither fear nor loathe it, and so we are not desperate for the "scientific" validity supposedly attached to the deadeningly impersonal tone and the thesis/support model of writing that mimics the format of a lab report.

We tell stories because we believe that writers are influenced by places as well as texts, and that they too should be explored.

We tell stories because we check original sources--the forests where bookstuff comes from before being penned up in libraries.

We tell stories because neither our minds nor our bodies nor our souls can be contained by the concrete walls--or are they abstract walls?--of a library.

But we also tell stories because our time spent in libraries tells us that's what language is for, for a library is if nothing else a repository of stories.

We tell stories for so many reasons that I have to use this ridiculously small font to fit them all on one page, and we've barely begun.

We tell stories because we are breaking down the barriers between subject (writer) and object (of study).

No, that's not it, we tell stories not to break barriers but to make connections between subject and object, we are verbs, we do, we tell.

We tell stories.

It's what we do.

At least, that's how it seems to me.

Ian Marshall, The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona