Grounding Southern Ecocriticism

What might the future of southern ecocriticism look like? Although neither of them tackles this question directly, and one of them doesn't bill itself as a work of ecocriticism at all, two studies from the last few years—or, rather, the unacknowledged intersections, gaps, and frictions between the two—suggest that a variety of ecocriticism grounded in the literatures, cultures, and places of the U.S. South has some vibrant years ahead of it. First, though, it is worth asking where Christopher Rieger and James L. Peacock's books achieve, and where they stop short of achieving, this kind of grounding.

As a clearly written and carefully researched work of (mostly) second-wave ecocriticism, Rieger's Clear-Cutting Eden lays a solid foundation for future ecocritical approaches to southern authors, particularly the main subjects of the study: Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner. Rieger argues persuasively that the pastoral mode of literature is more "adaptable and complex" (171) than it may seem, and his explorations of subcategories such as the antipastoral, the wilderness pastoral, and what he terms the "ecopastoral" represent meaningful contributions to ongoing ecocritical debates on the nature of the pastoral and its sustainability as a model for human life in a fragile world. In focusing on scenes of labor in novels produced during a historical period, the Great Depression, characterized by ecological devastation and, correspondingly, by enormous uncertainty regarding the issue of work itself, Rieger works hard to move beyond first-wave ecocriticism's tendency (see Buell 21) to treat the natural world as "an aesthetic object . . . or as an exotic 'other' that needs protection" (Rieger 16) rather than a set of places that humans, like other life-forms, cannot avoid inhabiting and/or transforming to some degree. Rieger's book does much to loosen the grip of "restrictive anthropocentric [nature-culture] dualisms" (72) on ecocriticism, even as the novels he examines perform similar kinds of work in their respective milieux.

Rieger promises at the outset to "ground [his] ecocritical approach in the material and economic history" (8) of the Depression-era U.S. South, and largely lives up to this promise, as seen in his frequent invocations of environmental and social historians. However, Clear-Cutting Eden could be more fully grounded in other respects. While reading the book I kept hoping that Rieger would offer his own thick descriptions of southern landscapes, particularly those that embody what he sees as the liberatory potential of the ecopastoral vision. I also wanted him to pay closer attention to some of the "material-semiotic" connections (Haraway 383, n. 11) between the places his authors inhabited and the worlds they (re)created in their powerfully earthbound fictions. Rieger's study does succeed in adding "the environment" to the now-traditional southern studies repertoire of concerns including race, class, and gender, and in showing how these "themes" are entangled, but this is precisely where the book falls short from a materialist ecocritical perspective. By essentially accepting mainstream U.S. culture's view of "the environment" as one "issue" among many rather than the ground of all being and meaning, Rieger unintentionally marginalizes what ecocriticism should be in the business of foregrounding. True, the distance between nature and culture has been substantially narrowed, and the asymmetries between them have mostly been leveled; Clear-Cutting Eden resists both the mainstream humanities' fool's errand of reducing nature to culture and first-wave ecocriticism's perhaps equally reductive inversion of the hierarchy by subordinating culture (in the form of literary theory) to nature (or rather, paradoxically, to cultural representations of it). But by not attending sufficiently to human culture's profound embeddedness within the biosphere, as well as to the liminal zones in southern fiction and in extratextual life where the very ideas of "nature" and...