Abstract
In order for the potential radicalism of the ecocritical project to be fully realized, the contradictions at its heart must be faced and worked out. As ecocritics have wrestled with the implications of their distinctive critical project, they have been made to confront quite fundamental theoretical questions. The most central of these is raised by the dissonance between, on one hand, the culturalist epistemological theories that have dominated literary studies for some years now, and, on the other, the common ecocritical claim that there is something unambiguously real about nature. How, we ask, can it be meaningful to say that nature, the irreducibly material world, is a cultural construct? Many have been attracted to the sharpness of Samuel Johnsons no-nonsense refutation of Bishop Berkeley. We rap our knuckles on the nearest desk and move on. But the question requires closer thought than that, for how we answer it will do much to shape the future of ecocriticism. Also, our answer will go far toward determining whether ecocriticism and the environmental movement it informs succeed in reversing the historical trends that called them into existence. There is a particular history behind the culturalist position. Understanding it can help ecocritics produce a genuinely new form of critical practice rather than merely reproduce in reverse the ideology of their predecessors.
They feel that they are never so fit for friendship, as when they have quit mankind, and taken themselves to friend. A picture, a book, a favorite spot in the hills or the woods, which they can people with the fair and worthy creations of the fancy, can give them often forms so vivid, that these for the time shall seem real, and society the illusion.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (CW 210)
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Notes
D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: T Seltzer, 1923), 1–8.
Norman Foerster, Nature in American Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1923), xii–xiii.
Lucy Lockwood Hazard, The Frontier in American Literature (New York: Thomas Y Crowell, 1927), 147–177.
Lawrence Buell, “American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised,” American Literary History, 1, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 6–29, maps the genealogy of the claim that American literature is diagnostically pastoral.
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 205, emphasis in original. For accounts of how mid-century literary studies, especially as practiced by such figures as Perry Miller, R.W.B. Lewis, and Henry Nash Smith, responded to the politics of the Cold War, see Graff, Professing Literature, 183–243, and
David R. Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as a Discipline (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 299–344.
Sherry B. Ortner, “If Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” (1974), in Jessica Munns and Gita Rajan, eds., A Cultural Studies Reader: History Theory, Practice, (New York: Longman, 1995), 496.
Alan Liu, “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism,” English Literary History, 56, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 747. For a historical analysis of the paradoxical pessimism that shapes much recent cultural studies scholarship,
see Alex Callinicos, Against Post-Modernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), which argues that European postmodernism represents a retrenchment in response to the failure of the revolutionary movements of 1968.
See also Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 63–102,
and Dick Hebdige, “After the Masses,” in Nicholas Dirks et al., eds., Culture/ Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 222–235.
James McKusick, Green Writing, 17. Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991), 1–11, 36–61. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 24.
Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 17. Kroeber, “Ecology and American Literature,” 310.
Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: Missouri, 1995) appeared not long after Kroeber’s call for an ecocriticism based on a recognition of the materiality of the brain. But Carroll materializes ecocriticism in precisely the wrong way, constructing a neoconservative cultural politics on the ground of sociobiology. This is not the place for an elaborate refutation, especially since this impressive tome, complete with gilt binding, has so far produced only a pleasing silence. If ecocriticism wishes to build a interdisciplinary project on the ground of the science of mind, it should start with
Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), the definitive refutation of sociobiology’s repackaging of Social Darwinism.
Terry Gifford, “The Social Construction of Nature,” ISLE 3, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 32–33. Verena Andermatt Conley, Ecopolitics: The Environment in Post-Structuralist Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), 47, 140, 94, 3, emphasis in original.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 19–20.
Chantal Mouffe, “Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New Concept of Democracy,” Stanley Gray, trans., in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 95–96. Another early culturalist rejoinder is
Paul L. Tidwell, “Academic Campfire Stories: Thoreau, Ecocriticism, and Fetishism of Nature,” ISLE 2, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 53–64. For additional examples of green postmodernism,
see Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Routledge, 1991), 169–249;
Jane Bennett and William Chaloupka, eds., In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
Max Oelschlaeger, ed., Postmodern Environmental Ethics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995);
and Jhan Hochman, Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel and Theory (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1998).
David Mazel, American Literary Environmentalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), xii, xv, 4.
Ibid., xvii–xviii, xvi. Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 111.
Kate Soper, What is Nature? (London: Basil Blackwell, 1995).
William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York: Norton, 1995).
Michael Soule and Gary Lease, eds., Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995).
Glen Love, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 8, 3.
Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (Oxford; New York : Oxford University Press, 2003), “philosophize” xii, xi.
I.G. Simmons, Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment (London: Routledge, 1993), 159–160.
Christopher Manes, “Nature and Silence,” Environmental Ethics, 14 (Winter 1992): 339–350. Harold Fromm, “From Transcendence to Obsolescence: A Route Map,” in Ecocriticism Reader, 39.
SueEllen Campbell, “The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep-Ecology and Poststructuralism Meet,” in Ecocriticism Reader, 127. Andrew McMurry, Environmental Renaissance : Emerson, Thoreau, & the Systems of Nature (Athens : University of Georgia Press, 2003), viii, 15, 227, 228.
Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
Timothy Luke, Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Buell, “The Ecocritical Insurgency,” 701–702. Buell, Writing for an Endangered Planet, 6. For a more extended meditation on Buell’s contention about myth making, see Randall Roorda, Dramas of Solitude: Narratives of Retreat in American Nature Writing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 205–225.
John R. Knott, Imagining Wild America: Wilderness and Wildness in the Writings of John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Mary Oliver (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002) argues that these six writers engaged in conscious myth-making.
I am indebted to William Keach for drawing my attention to Lenin’s epigram, which was a response to Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy and is quoted in Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). Howarth, “Some Principles of Ecocriticism,” 69. Glotfelty, “Introduction,” xix. Buell, “The Ecocritical Insurgency,” 704.
Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 362.
Kate Soper, “Greening Prometheus: Marxism and Ecology,” in Ted Benton, ed., The Greening of Marxism (New York: Guilford, 1996), 81–102. See Bate, Romantic Ecology, 1–4 and Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism, 31–32, for typical ecocritical denunciations of Marxism based on guilt by association.
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© 2005 Lance Newman
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Newman, L. (2005). The Nature of Cultural History. In: Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973535_2
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