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Beyond the text: literary field studies.

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Abstract

This article contends that ecocritics need to develop an interdisciplinary, field-based methodology to fully understand works of environmental literature. A variety of methods for studying and teaching environmental literature in the field are suggested and the benefits of each are demonstrated.

Ecocriticism: Promise and Problems

The rapidly growing field of ecocriticism, or literary ecology, has been defined as the study of the relationships between literature, culture, and environment. This emergent discipline was founded in the early 1990's with the establishment of ASLE (the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) and the publication of such ecocritical anthologies as The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. As a distinct field of literary criticism, ecocriticism developed in response to the growing recognition of the significance of American environmental literature, the importance environmental values play in the environmental crisis, and the efficacy with which literature represents and reinforces those values. The development of ecocriticism should be seen as continuing the expansion of literary criticism that has been ongoing since the 1950s. Since that time, the development of such schools of criticism as feminism, post-colonialism, Marxism, and multi-cultural studies has sought to enlarge the literary canon and offer more diverse approaches to the study of literature. While these schools have succeeded in recovering the lost voices of African and Native Americans, and laborers and women, as the editors of Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment note, "the 'voice' longest neglected has been that of our physical environment, the voice of nature, which cannot speak through conventional means" (xii). Like its predecessors, ecocriticism seeks to enlarge the canon and the scope of literary investigation. Unlike other fields of literary criticism though, it seeks to include the non-human natural world within the field of literary studies.

However, while ecocritics have been successful in expanding the literary canon and the lens through which we view works in it, they have remained firmly entrenched in classical--textually based--methods of scholarship and instruction. The need for developing new methods of investigation and instruction becomes clear when we recognize that nature writers often combine information from geology, ecology, psychology, and history with fictional elements and literary techniques to craft their work. From Charles Darwin and Gilbert White to Rachel Carson, and Gary Snyder nature writers approach their own work from an interdisciplinary perspective and thus require critics, and students alike, to be knowledgeable about a number of different fields. As Ian Marshall notes, "[i]f there is a methodology that sets ecocriticism apart from other modes of literary scholarship, it is its inherent interdisciplinary nature" (6). For Marshall, as well as many other critics, such an approach seems required by the inherent interdisciplinarity...

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