The Ecocritical Insurgency

“Ecocriticism” is a new movement, of the ‘90s really, still at an early state of unfolding. Although the term was coined twenty years ago, although critical readings of literary texts and movements in relation to ideas of nature, wilderness, natural science, and spatial environments of all sorts have been pursued for the better part of a century, only in the last decade has the study of literature in relation to environment begun, quite suddenly, to assume the look of a major critical insurgency. The “Who’s listening?” question that nagged me when I began such work in the late 1980s has given way to “How can I keep up with all that’s coming out?” and “Can I even keep track of, let alone stay in touch with, all the players?”

Will this burgeoning of literature-and-environment studies continue? Almost surely so, for at least two reasons. First, the field of application for environmentally-valenced critical inquiry is immense in duration and range. Given that human beings are inescapably biohistorical creatures who construct themselves, at least partially, through encounter with physical environments they cannot not inhabit, any artifact of imagination may be expected to bear traces of that. From this it follows that the scope of the inquiry extends in principle from the oldest surviving literary texts, such as the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, to the literature of the present moment—as is borne out by the sweep of such critical books as Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadows of Civilization and Louise Westling’s The Green Breast of the New World, both of which start with Gilgamesh. ¹ Second, as human civilizations enter the fin de siècle, “the environment” looms up as a more pressing, multifarious problem than ever before. If, as W. E. B. DuBois famously remarked, the key problem of the twentieth century has been the problem of the color line, it is not at all unlikely that the twenty-first century’s most pressing problem will be the sustainability of earth’s environment—and that the responsibility for addressing this problem, or constellation of problems, will increasingly be seen as the responsibility of all the human sciences, not just of specialized disciplinary enclaves like ecology or law or public policy.

So literature-and-environment studies are here to stay, no doubt about it. But what has ecocriticism achieved thus far? Where has it succeeded, where fallen short? What new directions might it be expected to take? What directions does it need to take in order to fulfill its potential? At different points, the nine essays in this special issue address all those questions, and so will I—in the form of a review of the movement’s history, emphases, internal disagreements, and future prospects, with special but not exclusive reference to the essays in the present issue.

Coherence vs. Dissensus: In the Movement, in These Essays

As their heterogeneity attests, to the extent that contemporary literature-and-environment studies can in fact be rightly called “a movement,” so far it looks less like, say, New Critical formalism, structuralism, deconstructionism, and New Historicism than like feminist and ethnic revisionism or Gay Studies; for it is on the whole more issue-driven than methodology-driven. ² Ecocriticism so far lacks the kind of field-defining statement that was supplied for more methodologically-focused insurgencies by, for example, Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature for New Critical formalism and Edward Said’s Orientalism for colonial discourse studies.

To be sure, it is possible to locate the inception point of the contemporary movement rather precisely: organizationally, as a ferment within the Western Literature Association that put the term “ecocriticism” into circulation, that gave birth to the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, its periodical ISLE, and a series of major conferences of increasingly international scope; ³ and substantively, as an inquiry focused especially in the first instance on Anglophone and particularly U.S. nonfiction and poetry about the natural world, ⁴ an inquiry that, as one can see from the notes of the contributions to this issue, has begun to generate a sizeable secondary literature and...