Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches

Introduction

kate rigby & axel goodbody Introduction ‘‘From its inception ecocriticism adopted a belligerent attitude towards critical theory.’’∞ This is the opening gambit of John Parham’s article entitled ‘‘The Poverty of Ecocritical Theory’’ in the ecocritical special issue of New Formations, a major British journal of culture, theory, and politics. Edited by Wendy Wheeler and Hugh Dunkerley, ‘‘Earthographies’’ joins a number of other recent publications, including Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer’s collection Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies and several new monographs , such as those of Kevin Hutchings, Dana Phillips, and Timothy Morton (and, we might add immodestly, Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby), which signal that the alleged ecocritical antipathy to theory is on the wane. This is in our view a welcome development, and one to which this volume seeks to contribute. Yet there is a sense in which the oft-repeated allegation that, until recently, ecocriticism has been universally atheoretical is misleading. For one thing, it overlooks some valuable early forays into ecocritical theorization , such as those of Patrick Murphy, who e√ectively harnessed Bakhtinian dialogics to the practice of ecofeminist criticism, and SueEllen Campbell, who was among the first to discern some significant points of confluence between poststructuralist critique and the kind of deep ecological thinking that informs much contemporary American nature writing. More generally, though, the charge of ecocritical theory-phobia fails to recognize the theoretical moment that is implicit in the admittedly widespread rejection of the then dominant mode of critical or cultural theory by most first-wave ecocritics . As Terry Eagleton avers in After Theory—a work that is itself eminently theoretical—theory ‘‘comes about when we are forced into a new selfconsciousness about what we are doing. It is a symptom of the fact that we can no longer take those practices for granted.’’≤ If this is so, then Cheryll Glotfelty’s insistence in the introduction to the first ecocriticism reader that, ≤ kate rigby & axel goodbody at a time when ‘‘earth’s life support systems were under stress,’’ it was simply unconscionable to continue with literary critical ‘‘business as usual’’ must be seen to mark a crucial point of departure for ecocritical theory.≥ In the hip world of North American literary and cultural studies where ecocriticism was to enjoy its first eΔorescence, ‘‘business as usual’’ was dominated by a set of theoretical approaches drawn largely from French poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, which purported to be subversive (as they certainly once were), but which had come to represent, as Eagleton observes, ‘‘a rather stifling orthodoxy’’ that seemed to o√er no point of entry for ecological concerns.∂ In this context, it is hardly surprising that the theoretical space opened up by ecocriticism was, in the first place, largely antipathetical to theory in its then prevalent modality. Thus, for example, in his first work of ecocriticism, Jonathan Bate expressed his exasperation with the doctrinaire linguistic constructivism of New Historicist Romanticism studies by proclaiming that it was ‘‘profoundly unhelpful to say ‘There is no nature’ at a time when our most urgent need is to address and redress the consequences of human civilization’s insatiable desire to consume the products of the earth.’’∑ And yet, as Laurence Coupe succinctly puts it in the introduction to his Green Studies Reader, ‘‘in order to defend nature,’’ as most ecocritics seek to do, they also need to ‘‘debate ‘Nature.’ ’’∏ In other words, the ecocritical objective of lending salience to what David Abram helpfully termed the ‘‘more-than-human world’’ within literary and cultural studies necessitates, among other things, a critique of inherited notions of ‘‘nature,’’ and thereby also ‘‘culture,’’ to which said ‘‘nature’’ is always implicitly opposed. In its very resistance to ‘‘theory,’’ then, ecocriticism cannot avoid assuming the burden of theoretical reflection that this resistance itself entails. The pressing question then becomes not how to escape from theory, but which path of theoretical reflection to pursue. Coupe o√ers some possibilities by including in his Reader texts by a number of European philosophers and cultural theorists , including Kate Soper, Raymond Williams, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer , and Martin Heidegger (to whom Bate himself turned in seeking to o√er a more theoretically reflected model of ecocritical practice in The Song of the Earth). By and large, however, it is true to say that the ‘‘ecocritical insurgency,’’ as Lawrence Buell terms it,π has so far failed to take advantage of the powerful and varied means of critique supplied by European philosophy , such as are presented...