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5 Ecocriticism’s Genesis
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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chapter five Ecocriticism’s Genesis Although william rueckert is usually cited as the only true begetter of the term “ecocriticism” in his 1978 essay “Literature and Ecology : An Experiment in Ecocriticism,”1 like just about everyone else I did not come across the term until much later. For me personally the only true begetter was Cheryll Glotfelty (formerly Burgess), from whom I received— retrospectively considered—a stunning letter in May of 1989, a form letter in fact that had also been sent out to two hundred other authors. It began, . . . I’m a PhD candidate in American literature at Cornell University, purportedly finishing up my dissertation on representations of nature in the American women’s literary tradition. The question that fires me incessantly is this: how can one, as a literary critic and teacher, contribute to the ecological health of the planet? It seems to me that ecological concerns are so pressing that they ought to eclipse every other concern. If I can’t find a way to approach literature ecologically, then I will have to abandon this profession as frivolous. Cheryll realized literary-environmental writings were scattered far and wide, as were the practitioners of such writing, most of whom probably felt like solo voices crying in the wilderness. To support this claim, Cheryll attached an amazing bibliography that she had compiled of what would come to be called “ecocritical” writings—it was to the authors of these that she mailed her letter as a twofold plea for help: to add to the bibliography and to help her to produce an anthology of the best of it. Her goal after accomplishing this, she concluded, was “to be the first professor of Literature and the Environment” once she finished her degree at Cornell and entered the job market (which in those days had not yet become bleak for the humanities ). At the bottom of her form letter she appended a handwritten note, alluding to her enthusiasm for “From Transcendence to Obsolescence ” and psyching me up for the sequels that were to follow. 58 I marveled that Cheryll had discovered all three of the essays that precede this chapter, since in those days there was no category in which to fit them and, as far as I knew, they had not been picked up in any bibliography or citation index. When I asked about this later on she reported that a professor friend of hers was using as text the Norton Reader, which had anthologized the “Transcendence” essay, appropriately positioned (in keeping with my primordial neuronal mix) between Plato and Woody Allen. Somehow, after reading it, she pressed on to find the other two. When I responded to her letter with enthusiasm, I received powerful encouragement. After extremely high praise of my essay, she added a postscript in which she reproduced for me the note she had written to herself after reading it: “Although acutely aware of ecological balance, this essay is inveterately anthropocentric still, showing little regard or concern for how human activities affect other species, focusing instead on how human activities, given biological realities, backfire to affect humans. I think even Fromm’s worldview stands to be enlarged.” How could I have resisted such a consciousness-raising challenge? The letters that followed sprung more surprises, such as the invitation to be coeditor of the purported anthology. I agreed to the editorial job if I could give her most of the credit for the book (which I did), and in the winter of 1990 I came up with the idea of proposing the very first ecocritical session to be held at the Modern Language Association convention. With a call for papers in the MLA Newsletter for a session on the greening of literary studies, we were launched into the unknown. The response was encouraging: many more potential papers were offered than could be accommodated. I chose the most promising, wrote a formal proposal— and MLA turned it down. Some of us sent angry complaints to the MLA office, asked to see the judges’ reports, and were incensed even further by the reports’ flimsiness. (This happened once again when I more recently proposed a session on Darwinian literary theory—and the excuses were even flimsier.) Undaunted, we tried again the following year with an almost identical proposal and the very same panelists, this time with mysterious success. Not knowing what to expect, I asked for a meeting room to accommodate an audience of twenty-five. On the 29th of...