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Article Excerpt
This essay argues that ecocriticism requires a theoretical foundation to establish its coherence as a literary subdiscipline, a foundation that should be sought not only in a general understanding of evolutionary theory but especially in a knowledge of evolutionary and related areas of psychology.
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Literary ecocriticism is motivated by environmental activism and focusses principally on representations of the physical environment, especially of non-human nature. Ecocriticism began developing about thirty years ago, but in the past ten years has gained momentum and become a recognized specialization within literary studies; the 1996 publication of Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm's The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology is generally regarded as the defining moment for the field. At that time, the editors of and several contributors to the anthology expressed dismay at the desultory acceptance of ecocriticism within English departments. Although contemporary humans are threatened with total environmental degradation, literary scholars, in the view of prominent ecocritics, remain apathetic about teaching and research in literature and ecology. As Glen Love puts it, "in the face of profound threats to our biological survival, we continue, in the proud tradition of humanism, to, as [David] Ehrenfeld says, 'love ourselves best of all,' to celebrate the self-aggrandizing ego and to place self-interest above public interest, even, irrationally enough, in matters of common survival" ("Revaluing" 226). The domain of ecocriticism has expanded considerably since 1996 (and especially since 1999), yet ecocritics continue to remark that the field's acceptance has not been particularly rapid (Bennett and Teague 3; Love, Practical).
If the palpable moral outrage at the entrenched anthropocentrism of several years ago has perhaps been somewhat assuaged by the growth of the field, there is, to date, remarkably little evidence of attempts to analyze the perceived slow development of ecocriticism and to remediate accordingly. Yet the rationale for conjoining environmental initiatives with the study of literature is less than self-evident, concern over environmental degradation notwithstanding. Literary works are artifacts of human mind, language, and behaviour that are directed toward the minds (and sometimes the behaviours) of other humans, but never toward the non-human environment; such dynamics suggest that the sets of relationships between literary works and the physical environment should be theorized and articulated with special care.
In the past four years, acknowledging theoretical and definitional problems with their area, ecocritics and other scholars have been differentially successful in addressing the area's weaknesses. Some scholars frankly take ecocriticism to task for its lack of focus and coherence as a literary field, noting that ecocritics avoid formulating a theoretical foundation to the detriment of their sub-discipline (Phillips; Carroll); that the area is more issue-driven than methodology-driven (Keir and Lewis; Buell, "Ecocritical" 700); and that the content of the literature it explores has been too narrowly circumscribed (Buell, "Ecocritical" 703; Carroll 305).
In this essay, my aim is to reassert ecocriticism's need for a theoretical base to give the area coherence and identity and to suggest especially that evolutionary, developmental, and cognitive psychology are indispensable to understanding human attitudes to physical environments. Whereas Joseph Carroll and Glen Love stress the importance of general evolutionary theory for ecocriticism, then, my emphasis is on the implications of the psychology of an adapted organism for the area's theory and practice (Love, "Ecocriticism"; Practical). Quite simply, since the adapted human mind produces literature, that mind's modes of perceiving its surround are, in all likelihood, central to the literary representations of persons, places, and their interactions.
Criticisms of the sub-discipline's content have been swiftly and substantially addressed. While ecocriticism retains, on the whole, an "up-country-and-outback orientation" (Buell, in Arnold et al. 1,091)--the gigantic Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook, edited by Patrick D. Murphy, is geographically organized and primarily devoted to textual interpretation of nature writing--attention to urban environments, environmental justice, and ecofeminist perspectives has broadened the range of physical environments under consideration. Indeed, much of this work appeared in print contemporaneously with the criticism calling for ecocritical treatments of racially and ethnically diverse texts (Arnold et al.) as well as a greater range of physical places (Buell, "Ecocritical"; Bate; Carroll).
Yet this expansion of the canon of ecocriticism has proceeded in lieu of a clearly articulated set of theoretical principles. In a sense, this is not surprising, for, in meeting the challenge to diversify the area's content, ecocritics confront no thorny issues about the relationship of values to intellectual work. Indeed, some ecocritics make a virtue of the problem: swift to diversify the field's literary content and, to some extent, its methodology, because these changes harmonize with our liberal democratic value system, they follow the lead of some recent theory, celebrating the field's under-theorization in the name of pluralism and activism.
However, social and intellectual purposes hardly admit to a tidy sameness, and knowledge in any field will be hindered if we simply include more phenomena and neglect ideas. The assumption that academic and social goals will coincide bears witness to a recurrent anti-intellectualism within literary theoretical culture that probably harks back to the founding of English studies as the preserve of spiritual values and class affiliations (Graff; Eagleton). Yet if ecocriticism, like any other academic unit, is to be firmly established and recognized, it will hardly do to define it as "less a method than an attitude," as do the editors of one recent anthology (Tallmadge and Harrington x). We all have many attitudes, some more rationally or ethically justifiable than others, but no attitude alone can define or sustain an area of intellectual inquiry.
Ecocriticism's eschewal of theory exhibits both a debt to and a rejection of postmodern theoretical commonplaces that, considered together, define the epistemological contradiction at the area's core. On the one hand, ecocritics are loathe to embrace the radical scepticism so pervasive in recent theory, a move that, because it questions the notion that we have access to a shared mind-independent reality, would leave them, incidentally, without their primary object of study and political concern, the non-human natural world. This step away from radical scepticism is a refreshing change, but it seems more instrumental than intellectual, since ecocritics seem unwilling to articulate an epistemology. For scholars like John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington, who insist upon the constructed nature of nature but assert simultaneously the conviction that "there is a real environment without which there could be no environmentalism," we are left to ask what the precise relationship of constructs to actualities is and, given their own emphasis on constructionism, how we can be assured that what the mind constructs bears any relation to the world's presumed substance (xii). On the other hand, many ecocritics, especially ecofeminists, are quick to adopt Foucauldian-inspired assumptions about the insidious and self-perpetuating nature of social systems and discourse. The belief that any theory necessarily instantiates a dominative discourse results in justifications like the following: rather than defining a single ecofeminist perspective, "Marti Kheel suggests that we instead understand ecofeminist theory as 'a number of theories or stories that, when woven together into a...
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