Introduction

Fredric Jameson has written that nature is gone for good, but each of the following articles in this special edition of Comparative Literature Studies shows that it would indeed be an exaggeration to suggest ecocriticism is gone for good. Ecocriticism is increasingly finding itself part of the academic mainstream, especially in growing interdisciplinary avenues of study such as comparative literature. The title of this collection of articles, "Sustaining Ecocriticism: Comparative Perspectives," highlights the beneficial and productive reciprocity between each field. Comparative literary studies offers one way to sustain ecocriticism in the wake of theoretical claims about the disappearance of nature. In turn, ecocriticism provides the impetus of a call for action often absent in studies in comparative literature.

We divide the articles in the issue into two sections: "Displacing Ecocriticism," and "Revisioning Ecocritical Geographies." The two sections form the material of a broader debate about the role of place in criticism: the first three articles in "Displacing Ecocriticism" eschew the ecocritical need to talk about location, while the final five articles in "Revisioning Ecocritical Geographies" do talk about place. But the last five articles imagine a comparative geography that undoes the monoglossia, geographical provincialism, and place-based individual nationalism that has characterized some ecocritical studies. In tandem, the two sections in this special issue offer perspectives- contradictory at times, particularly with respect to the significance given to the role of place-on both the ways in which sustaining ecocriticism depends on comparative literary inquiry and on the fruitfulness of ecocriticism for vitalizing comparative literature.

The Irish avant-garde writer Samuel Beckett serves as point of departure for the first article of this issue dedicated to ecocriticism and comparative literature. Petar Ramadanovic begins "How to Talk About Nature When There Is No More Nature to Talk About: Toward a Sustainable Universal" by citing Hamm in Samuel Beckett's Endgame who proclaims: "No more nature. You exaggerate." Ramadanovic seeks to find the place of exaggeration, that is, the place where a universal still exists permitting criticism to find a place for nature that does not call it by name. Ramadanovic-influenced by Bruno Latour, who argues that discourses about nature have been the chief obstacle in confronting the planetary scope of the multiple environmental crises that face the earth-sets out to articulate an epistemology for the field of ecocriticism. Outlining a "sustainable universal" to replace the metaphysical concept of nature that impedes a full-fledged environmentalism, Ramadanovic proposes that science and poststructuralism unite, because only in a poststructuralist science can ecocriticism contain every particular sustainable that depends on every other. Fundamentally, since science is "the single most important prerequisite for any discourse that can call itself sustainable," Ramadanovic aims to articulate a paradoxical nonplace for nature that seeks a total picture, providing a place of sustainability as well as a suture for what many believe to be a poststructuralist rift between the humanities and sciences.

Tze-Yin Teo, in "Sustaining Nothing: Untranslatable Material in Beckett's Worstward Ho," focuses on one of Beckett's last literary works and argues on behalf of the notion of "untranslatable material" in her discussion of the notion of sustainability. Teo posits that we should turn critical attention from the "problem of the future and the language of impending crisis" to the category of the present, a claim that stands as both a foil and companion to Ramadanovic's assertion about the importance of the sustainable universal. Instead of science, she forges a poetically minded ecocriticism, arguing for the dismissal of the notion of sustainability and for a criticism that focuses on sustaining. Teo explores both Beckett's original English version of Worstward Ho and its French translation. Even though Beckett declares the text to be untranslatable, it has been translated, and, Teo argues, it is the matter of the text that is untranslatable. Alain Badiou (who she suggests mistakenly focuses on the untranslatable literariness of the text when he should focus on the untranslatability of the material of the text) offers the fundamental kernel of the argument proposed by Teo: the paradoxical event of being that sustains the present is calculated in advance by...