Narrative Scholarship: Storytelling in Ecocriticism

John Tallmadge, "Narrative Ecocriticism"

I appreciate the opportunity to offer a few thoughts about narrative ecocriticism. I believe it is very pertinent to the study of nature writing especially, and to ecocritical studies generally. It also has wider applicability to the study of any literary works that depend heavily on their referential dimension.

I would define narrative criticism as bringing one's own experience of persons or places to bear upon the interpretation of works where these persons or places figure. For example, to understand Thoreau's "Ktaadn," one would go to the mountain and perhaps follow Thoreau's ascent route at the same time of year and under similar conditions. The narrative of that experience would provide a subjective lens through which to view Thoreau's text. It would not replace other modes of interpretation, but combine with them to give a stereoscopic view. I have proposed a model of narrative criticism that I call "a natural history of reading" (CEA paper, 1992) because it applies the method of the natural historian to encounters with literary works, and with nature writing specifically. Essentially, the method proposes combining two "disciplines," a discipline of erudition that exposes the text's intertextual relations, and a discipline of engagement that exposes the texts grounding in actual nature through the subjective lens of the critic's own experience of the world. A given work of criticism might lean toward discipline or the other. Erudition reflects what we think of as normal or conventional literary study. Engagement reflects the practice of nature writers themselves. It's rare to find the two in perfect balance.

Theoretical and conceptual arguments for such a mode of criticism can be drawn from Barry Lopez's essay "Landscape and Narrative," which posits the truth inherent in the order of the landscape as a reference for the truth of the story. Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination argues for a recuperation of the referential dimensions of literary texts: if we are to judge literature from an ecocentric perspective, we must take the referential dimension more seriously than would modern and postmodern literary theory. Sherman Paul's Hewing to Experience draws a suggestive analogy between the critic and the explorer reporting from an undiscovered coast. Recent experiments in this mode of criticism include Sean O'Grady's Pilgrims to the Wild, John Elder's Imagining the Earth, and parts of Sherman Paul's For Love of the World as well as my own Meeting the Tree of Life.

John Tallmadge, The Union Institute