Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

 Ann Ronald, "Narrative Voices: Past to Present"

For many nineteenth-century writers, literary criticism and cultural commentary were synonymous. Such major figures as Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold sought intellectual connections between the two, engaging their readers in the historical milieu of the past and the sociological complexities of the present as well as the essays, novels, and poems of Europe, England, and America. Along with rigorous analysis, they filled their prose with stories, vignettes, pointed allusions to their friends and foes. Their successors, early twentieth-century humanists like Lionel Trilling for example, did the same. Only with the advent of the so-called "new" criticism did the critic lose his narrative voice.

When I was in graduate school (she said, switching to her own voice), my Northwestern professors indoctrinated me into a theoretical environment hostile to the impersonal textually-analytic Chicago School. The battlelines were clearly drawn. On the south side, a text reigned supreme; in the suburbs to the north, cultural contexts were just as important as words on the page. 'They' were to grow into third-generation I.A. Richardses and R.S. Cranes; 'we' were to be latter-day Matthew Arnolds (or Matthew-inas, as the case may be). 'They' were to be the critic as luminary; 'we,' the critic as conversationalist.

For more than half a century--I believe until feminist voices sounded a different 1970s tone--the Chicago approach prevailed. Certainly I felt out of sync as I tried to build an assistant professor publication record and found editors excising my first person pronouns and stifling my narrative impulses. Now, however, times have changed. A host of late twentieth-century voices--feminist, Marxist, new historicist--has swung the pendulum back. Constructionists, deconstructionists, and postdeconstructionists are swinging on the pendulum too, but I personally think the most effective 1990s critics are those with intellectual connections back to Arnold and Carlyle--men and women whose readings of literary texts weave anecdotes and personal experiences together with observations on culture and society, thinkers who write with voices of their own.

We are the logical next step. Backpackers, climbers, hikers, bikers, birders, environmentalists, ecologists, lovers of what is wild, readers, writers, thinkers, dreamers and do-ers--we are walking Matthew Arnold out of England, packing his Kelty with Thoreau, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard and Gary Snyder, filling his senses with grizzlies, granite, sagebrush, spotted owls, prairie dogs, open-pit mines, cheat grass, tamarisk, slickrock, snowmelt, and wolves, while guiding him along the High Divide. Along the way, we're talking to him, telling him stories, too.

Ann Ronald, University of Nevada, Reno