Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

Stephanie Sarver, "Narrative Scholarship"

How do I define narrative scholarship? As I see it, traditional academic writing, as opposed to narrative scholarship, lays claim to "objectivity" through its invocation of "fact." This factuality is reflected in citations, which document the research that informs the writing. As scholars, we acquire our credentials through evidence of our research; this evidence earns our readers' trust by providing them with enough information to confirm that we are not "making up stories." But as post-modern scholars, we all know that all academic writing is, to some extent, a story, i.e., a thoughtful selection of information arranged in a way that will lead readers to certain conclusions. In traditional academic writing, the storytelling is extracted from the text and submerged in a parallel narrative of footnotes and citations--the scholars "tale" of research. The story behind the text is implied, rather than overtly acknowledged.

Narrative scholarship may lift the parallel narrative of research into the text, where we participate in the authors' process of discovery and analysis. As its name suggests, narrative scholarship may serve a didactic function, informing by way of a story. When the story deals in facts not easily corroborated by the reader, it provides evidence that nonetheless allows us to trust in the writer's authority. The reliable narrative scholar includes enough information to reflect a careful consideration of the topic discussed, which can be corroborated by the research and experience of others. Effective narrative scholarship is grounded in a rigorous scholarly method, that is, the writer knows her subject, either through research or experience, and this knowledge is reflected in the text, into which the "scholarship" has been artfully woven. Narrative scholarship may blur the arbitrary line between objectivity and subjectivity, between the scholarly and the creative. Given this, the range of works that might be defined as narrative scholarship is broad: I count Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life in this category, as well as John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid, and Gary Paul Nabhan's The Desert Smells Like Rain. And then there are such works as Gary Snyder's Practice of the Wild and Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, which hang on the cusp between narrative scholarship and creative narrative.

So what's the problem with narrative scholarship? It may require work of its readers. If the work forgoes footnotes and citations of sources, and if we are reading as scholars, we must be diligent in our analysis. We may have to search for arguments and evidence. In identifying potential problems I find myself with several questions: How do we know that a writer of narrative scholarship is reliable? If narrative scholarship challenges the categories of objective and subjective, how do we distinguish scholarship from art? (For example, how do we make sense of such works as Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan tales?)

Narrative scholarship defies conventional notions of what academic writing should look like. When it looks like a story, we may be inclined to dismiss it as entertainment; when it situates the writer smack-dab in the middle of the text, it may challenge the notion of scholarly objectivity. These questions point not only to the problems, but also to the strengths of narrative scholarship: it overtly acknowledges the difficulty of writing from an objective point of view. Its very structure acknowledges the story-telling dimension of writing; when the writer makes her presence evident in the text, she clarifies her point of view, giving the reader useful information by which the text can by understood and interpreted. Most important, by situating information and insights within the structure of a narrative, a writer can transform the abstract into the concrete through example and illustration without necessarily losing the important elements of observation, analysis, and criticism. The biggest risk of narrative scholarship, as I see it, is that it can stray too far into the personal, becoming confessional, self-conscious, and even trivial; or it can slide too far into the narrative, or story, and thereby lose its scholarly dimension. Nonetheless, artfully executed, narrative scholarship seems to be a great way to move away from the often dry, lifeless prose of traditional scholarly writing. In speaking to our imaginations, it can carry us along a path that educates as it entertains.

Stephanie Sarver, University of California, Davis