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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [17], Line —— -0.0 —— Norm * PgEn [17], anthony lioi Of Swamp Dragons Mud, Megalopolis, and a Future for Ecocriticism In her classic Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas defines ritual pollution as “matter out of place” and concludes that such pollution can be a door to whole cosmologies: “Where there is dirt, there is a system” (44). Accordingly, she distinguishes between “dirt-affirming” and “dirt-rejecting” cultures based on their reaction to ritual pollution (202). To affirm dirt is to recognize that impurity is inevitable, and to offer it a carefully defined place that recognizes and contains its power. To reject dirt is to imagine that it can be separated from what is sacred, and to finalize that separation by annihilating pollution from the cosmic order itself. I want to suggest that despite its desire to affirm Earth, much of ecocritical culture has been dirt-rejecting. In our quest to promote wildness and nonanthropocentric cosmologies, ecocritics have shunned texts and places compromised by matter-out-of-place, the ritual uncleanness of cities, suburbs, and other defiled ecosystems. Though I am not the first to notice this problem, the pattern of dirt-denying has continued. Therefore, we must consciously construct a symbolic place in ecocriticism for dirt and pollution, an alias or icon that allows us to give dirt its due. I suggest that American ecocritics consider the figure of the swamp dragon—embodying elemental mixture, ethical impurity, and serpentine wisdom—as an alternative to the posture of prophet and judge, the arbiters of purity and righteousness.1 The critic need not always stand on a mountaintop, declaiming. Before I explain further , however, we need to take a short trip into the slippery terrain of disciplinary flux. A glance at recent publications reveals that ecocriticism is entering a moment of transfiguration. Though ecocritics have been asking ourselves what methods and canons constitute the field for as long as the field has existed, the last five years offer signs that this questioning has entered a peculiarly intense phase. As ecocriticism moves out of the margins of literary studies, as the founders of the field acquire tenure, departmental chairs, 17 18 anthony lioi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [18], Line —— 0.0p —— Shor PgEn [18], and emeritus positions, it becomes possible to transform as well as defend the field. Evidence of this change can be seen even in a brief list of works that seek to expand the domain of ecocriticism and to question its founding assumptions: Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace structured Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (2001) to encompass nations, genres, traditions, and periods beyond American nature writing of the past two centuries, as did Patrick Murphy in Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature (2000). Lawrence Coupe’s The Green Studies Reader (2000) attempted with great success to reverse-engineer the theoretical foundations of the field to include British and Continental philosophy and more recent work in Cultural Studies. Steven Rosendale, in The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and Environment (2002), mixed old and new texts and approaches, balancing our traditional strengths with original directions. In the first summa since Cheryll Glotfelty’s Ecocriticism Reader, Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic edited The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism , 1993–2003 (2003), representing a more assured critical center culled from our flagship journal. More radical challenges appeared as well. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein edited The Environmental Justice Reader (2003) to recenter the discipline on activism and non-Anglo, nonmiddle -class texts and cultures, while Dana Phillips’s The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (2003) issued a challenge to rethink what we know about ecology as a science and its relationship to literarycritical method. Finally, Lawrence Buell, long the defender of the Thoreauvian center of green letters, moved decisively toward the literature of environmental crisis in Writing for an Endangered World (2001). In the midst of these magisterial contributions, I offer a more modest rubric for critical trans...

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