Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film

Introduction: From Literary to Cinematic Ecocriticism

1 introduction from literary to cinematic ecocriticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . paula willoquet-maricondi Human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. —Cheryll Glotfelty, The Ecocriticism Reader Nature, unfortunately for the organization of academia, is vexingly interdisciplinary. —Glen Love, The Ecocriticism Reader Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film owes its greatest debt and inspiration to the field of literary ecological criticism, or ecocriticism; to the seminal texts that helped shape this field since the mid-1990s; to the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; and to the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), the organization that has supported the growth and strengthening of this field of study. Since its official inception in the early 1990s and its recognition as a significant academic field of study, ecocriticism has expanded beyond the area of literary analysis to embrace the study of other forms of cultural production, including theoretical discourse, music, photography, virtual environments, and film and video. Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace’s collection of essays, Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, reflects the perspective of many practitioners of ecocriticism that ‘‘one of ecocriticism’s most important tasks at this time is expanding its boundaries . . . to address a wider spectrum of texts’’ (2). Thus, Scott Slovic’s observation in 2000 that ecocriticism is ‘‘being re-defined daily by the actual practice of thousands of literary scholars around the world’’ holds true today more than ever and in relation to a wider range of fields and texts (161). Because of its broad scope of inquiry, ecocriticism remains ‘‘methodologically and theoretically eclectic’’ (Rosendale xv), and does not have a ‘‘widely-known set of assumptions, doctrines, or procedures’’ within the academy as a whole (Barry 248). Serpil Oppermann notes that ecocriti- 2 Paula Willoquet-Maricondi cism has no ‘‘field defining theoretical model’’ in place beyond its aim to promote ecological awareness, to bring ecological consciousness to the study of literary texts and other cultural productions, and to understand the place and function of humans in relation to the nonhuman world (105). Ursula Heise agrees that ecocriticism is not an easy field to define partly because of the diverse political and disciplinary influences that have shaped the field. She argues that ‘‘somewhat like cultural studies, ecocriticism coheres more by virtue of a common political project than on the basis of shared theoretical and methodological assumptions, and the details of how this project should translate into the study of culture are continually subject to challenge and revision’’ (506). This ‘‘common political project’’ is complex, multifaceted, at times contradictory, and as a result difficult to delineate. As Heise suggests, however, what is ‘‘common’’ to an otherwise diverse movement are the challenges and critiques of the conceptual dichotomies and simplistic understandings of human progress that have shaped modernity at least since the seventeenth century. Thus, to the extent that ecocritics do share a ‘‘common political project,’’ the politics of this project can only be understood in the broadest terms. No common specific political agenda can be said to unify the various manifestations of ecocriticism, ranging from deep ecology to social ecology, animal rights, and environmental justice. This plurality is reflected in the essays collected here, which offer perspectives ranging from those fostering more ecocentric-oriented worldviews to those addressing specific environmental injustices affecting communities worldwide. In the case of films by or about Aboriginal peoples’ struggles for self-determination, these seemingly different political agendas often coalesce. Since the history and scope of ecocriticism has been amply documented by others, the following brief summary will serve to contextualize the essays in the present volume, as well as highlight the continuities and innovations this collection brings to the study of the intersections of nature and culture. As broadly defined by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm in one of the earliest foundational texts for ecocritics, literary ecocriticism, and its manifestations in other fields, takes an earth-centered, environmentally conscious approach to the study of texts and to the investigation of the relationship between these texts and the physical environment. It offers an environmental perspective on culture in the same way that feminist and Marxist criticism have given us, respectively, gender and class consciousness (xviii). Ecocriticism helps us identify works that have an environmental orientation—that is, that fit the three criteria Introduction 3 outlined by Lawrence...