Comparative Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene

PMLA, 2006

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2010

Joni Adamson and I didn't realize we would spur such an eager response in the international community of ecocritics when we mentioned in our introduction to the Summer 2009 special issue of MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States the possibility that the current interest in exploring ethnicity through the study of environmental literature might represent one dimension of a new "third wave of ecocriticism." What we actually wrote in the MELUS introduction went as follows: Literary expression of environmental experience is as diverse as any other body of writing, of course. Yet until recently the community of ecocritics has been relatively non-diverse and also has been constrained by a perhaps overly narrow construing of "white" and "non-white" as the primary categories of ethnicity. Therefore, this issue will explore what seems to be a new third wave of ecocriticism, which recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries; this third wave explores all facets of human experience from an environmental viewpoint. (6-7) The articles collected in that issue seemed, for the most part, to be doing something different than ecocriticism we had observed during earlier phases of this scholeadarly discipline, focusing on cultural background and ethnic identity more intensely than had been the case in early ecocriticism, but also seeking to overcome the limiting, isoleadating focus on specific cultures as unique phenomena. The impulse to study human experience in relation to the more-than-human world and to compare human experience across cultures, in particular, struck us as an altogether different tendency than we had observed during the first two "waves" of the field. Let me back up for a moment and quickly outline, in general terms, the history of ecocriticism. The term "ecocriticism" was first used in William Rueckert's 1978 article "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism," and it is common, at least in North America, to mark the initial phase of ecocriticism as beginning around 1980 with the following principle foci: nonfiction "nature writing"; non-human nature and wilderness

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2009

JAST: Journal of American Studies of Turkey, 2009

The larger system is the biosphere, and the subsystem is the economy. The economy is geared for growth…whereas the parent system doesn't grow. It remains the same size. So as the economy grows…it encroaches upon the biosphere, and this is the fundamental cost… Herman Daly I went to the land of sagebrush, towering pine trees, and clear blue skies, in 2010, to spend my sabbatical year in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, which has the major graduate program in the U.S. devoted to Literature and Environment. 1 In the future, when I look back to this year, I will remember it as a meaningful time that gave me a unique opportunity to explore the dedicated literary activities of American ecocritics in saving the planet from ongoing environmental injustices. I will also remember it as the time when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and blighted the Earth, devastating the Gulf of Mexico. Paradoxes akin to my own experience are frequently recast in American environmental writing: on the one hand, an attitude of dominion over the land, and on the other, the strong attitude of the committed writers and the

2010

In recent years, ecocriticism has become one of the most visible and productive new directions of literary and cultural studies. Having originated in the United States as a minor, mostly regional form of environmentally oriented approach in the late 20 th century, it has since spread throughout literature departments, and become a successful new branch of the humanities not only in the U.S. and Europe but worldwide. At first, ecocriticism met with considerable resistance at first from a scholarly community that was deeply shaped by the theoretical fields of cultural studies, poststructuralism, and postmodernism 1. However, it has gained increasing recognition as an important new field of research and teaching that opens up a broad spectrum of new perspectives and that can help to reaffirm the relevance and responsibility of the humanities and of literary studies at a time when the process of globalization, and the concomitant globalization of knowledge and science, continue to be interpreted in primarily economic and technological terms. One of the most promising directions of ecocriticism, which has developed especially in Europe, is the approach of Cultural Ecology. From the perspective of the theory of science, Peter Finke"s Ökologie des Wissens (Ecology of Knowledge) is perhaps the most systematic presentation of this theory, which posits ecology as a paradigmatic perspective of knowledge not only for the natural sciences, but for cultural studies as well. Such an ecology of knowledge implies a unifying perspective in the sense that it brings together the various cultures of knowledge that have evolved in history, and that have been separated into more and more specialized disciplines and subdisciplines in the evolution of modern science. Indeed, if ecocriticism is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between culture and nature, then it must necessarily also face up to the challenge of a new dialogue between the "two cultures" of the natural sciences and the humanities. Disciplines on both sides of the divide thereby turn into "shifting hybrid domains," in which traditional disciplinary boundaries are blurred (Wilson Consilience 10). At the same time, this drive for the 1 There is, however, no binary opposition between the epistemologies of postmodernism and ecology, as Linda Hutcheon has pointed out, and as the later writings of Lyotard and Derrida among others demonstrate (Lyotard, Derrida).

Environmental Ethics, 2018

In Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, editors Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino have assembled 19 essays and interventions by some of the most distinguished names in a now 'multisperspectival' (xi) research field, from Greta Gaard to Wendy Wheeler and Kate Rigby, all focused on finding 'more critical and imaginative tools to comprehend the Anthropocene' (13). The challenge faced by the collection's contributors is elegantly summarised by Richard Kerridge in his Foreword (xiii-xvii). 'Even as the Anthropocene challenges uscollective humanityto take greater and more exceptional responsibility,' he writes, 'it also admonishes us for past hubris, and relegates us to the category of stumbling, floundering creatures whose plans go awry because we understand too little: in other words, natural creatures, caught up in forces beyond our understanding' (xv). Not the least difficulty is, therefore, one of finding a narrative or narratives that might contain the multitudes denoted by Kerridge's reference to 'collective humanity'. In fact, and as Kerridge also points out, 'some of the contributors to the collection reject the term "Anthropocene"' precisely because it assumes a 'unitary Anthropos' (xvi). From a 'feminist, postcolonial or more broadly Environmental Justice perspective' (xvii), humans are not all equally responsible for 'environmental disasters' (xv), nor equally able to rise to the challenge those disasters present. Moreover, and as the material turn has underlined, humankind is entangled with the morethan-human in ways that emphasize the extent to which both 'are continuously engaged in the production and modification of the system and thus of each other' (xvi). If this inevitably suggests a 'rich array' of different perspectives, as Oppermann and Iovino point out in their own Introduction (1-22), those perspectives are nevertheless brought together by a strong and shared sense of the urgency of 'current ecological crises' (1) created by and 'within systems of massive exploitation of limited natural capital' (2). Arguably, the Environmental Humanities are united within a 'ethical-educational project of creating alliances between science, society, and cultural discourses' (3): '[t]he pivotal question here is: how will new modes of knowing and being, which the Environmental Humanities call for, enable environmentally just practices?' (2). Divided into four parts, the collection turns first to the challenge of 'Re-mapping the Humanities (23-112). In the opening chapter, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asks if 'word' and 'world' are really as passive as the term Anthropocene implies (25). Instead, he shifts the emphasis towards a 'posthuman environs' (the chapter title) built around 'eco-sonorous terms' (27) that highlight the way that matter inscribes humans, 'regardless of the epochs we declare' (25). In 'Environmental History between Institutionalization and Revolution', Marco Armiero engages with a different aspect of anthropocentrism, the '"human-centric" discipline' of history (45), and the tension between its (potentially revolutionary) transformation and its absorption into the mainstream (45), wryly concluding 'I would prefer to ignore the academic Winter Palace and Occupy reality!' (57). Next, Hubert Zapf explores the challenge of interdisciplinarity through a chapter on 'Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Transdisciplinary Knowledge of Literature', focusing on some of the ways in which literary knowledge might already offer forms of 'transdisciplinary GREEN LETTERS: STUDIES IN ECOCRITICISM

Th e article sketches a brief overview of the American 11a111re-writi11g tradition, with reference to Thomas Lyon's useful taxonomy of 11at11re writing, offering an 11pda1ed contextualization of this tradition 1ha1 takes into account the emergence of modern e11viron111e111alis111 in American cu/Jure. Ecoliterature can be unders tood to encompass no/ 011/y ideologically driven works of literary envi-ro11111entalis111, but also strains of rece111 nature writing !hat in one way or another serve 10 foreground !he no11-h1.1111an environing world and may even explore con-ceptua/izalions of nature and culture (especially 1he 11a1ure-c11/ture i11Je1.face) anywhere along a moderate-to-radical continuum of engagement in environmental ethics or applied principles of ecology. The rise of ecolilerature in /are 20'" cenflll)' American fellers is also discussed in relation to an emergent lradition of environmental literal)' criticism, or ecocriticism, as ii has come lo be more...

Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication, 2019

The point of departure for this study is the hypothesis that the American genre of nature writing has reached an important crossroads in the way it describes the human-nature relationship. My study argues that the awareness of the large-scale environmental changes that are signaled in terms such as the Anthropocene has changed the way nature writers approach their genre. Where traditional nature writing would tend to posit a separation between pristine and humanized environments, the nature writing of the Anthropocene emerges from the awareness that environmental impacts have reached a scope where no such distinction can be made. The traditional narrative of retreat to pristine nature or the wilderness from civilization has thus been replaced in Anthropocenic nature writing with the narrative of confrontation with a natural environment impacted by humans. This is a dystopian tendency in the genre, in which descriptions of nature are increasingly characterized by the writer's concerns over what is happening to the landscape in question, and what the future might hold in a world where industrial humanity is affecting all ecological processes. Such literature increasingly foregrounds the best available environmental science, and the texts mark a shift from the traditional focus on spiritual connections with the environment, towards more material and functional understandings of the role of humanity in the complex organic and inorganic dynamics that maintain the world's ecosystems. This dissertation analyzes the emergence of Anthropocenic awareness in selected texts of contemporary American nature writing with reference to its five main features: scientific interest in the function of ecosystems, interest in the agency of matter rendered through what is referred to as material nature writing, the dignification of the overlooked, the environmental landscape of fear, and a turn in the genre towards matters of environmental justice. Even though what I refer to as Anthropocenic nature writing may seem dystopian, this dissertation foregrounds the various ways in which the narrative of confrontation with the human also invites activism and engagement in the hope of stimulating change and environmental justice.

2003