Ecocriticism

Leonor Martínez Serrano

Originally coined by William Rueckert in an essay titled “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978), the term ‘ecocriticism’ refers to the study of literature from a critical standpoint sensitive to ecology and the degradation of the biosphere as the home life has patiently built for itself. Ecocriticism has increasingly become more prominent owing to the impact of anthropogenic action on the planet in the new geological epoch termed ‘Anthropocene’ (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000), whose origins are to be traced back to the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Ecocritics analyse literary texts by foregrounding environmental issues and critically looking into how homo sapiens relates to the nonhuman world or to what ecophilosopher David Abram (1996) terms ‘the more-than-human world’ — which encompasses both (non)human and (in)animate entities — from an interdisciplinary perspective. As a critical approach to the study of literature, ecocriticism emerged in the United States in the late 1970s, but only crystallised into a coherent movement in the 1990s. In the US, it is closely related to the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), which organises a biennial conference and publishes the scholarly journal Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment (ISLE). American ecocriticism is associated with Lawrence Buell’s monumental The environmental imagination: Thoreau, nature writing, and the formation of American culture (1995) and Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm’s The ecocriticism reader: Landmarks in literary ecology (1996), whereas British ecocriticism is often associated with the journal Green Letters and such landmark volumes as Jonathan Bate’s Romantic ecology: Wordsworth and the environmental tradition (1991) and Laurence Coupe’s The green studies reader: From romanticism to ecocriticism (2000).

The practice of ecocriticism amounts to interrogating literary texts as a form of cultural critique overtly marked by a deep sense of engagement, commitment and denunciation of practices that are damaging or destructive to the more-than-human world. Buell (1995) defines “ecocriticism” as the “study of the relation between literature and environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (p. 430), thus pointing to the political and ethical implications inherent in this mode of reading literary texts. In fact, ecocriticism has always remained “an avowedly political model of analysis” (Garrard, 2004, p. 3). Similarly, Glotfelty (1996) thinks of ecocriticism as being “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (p. xviii) and claims that “literature does not float above the material world in some aesthetic ether, but, rather, plays a part in an immensely complex global system in which energy, matter, and ideas interact” (p. xix), anticipating a basic premise of material ecocriticism (Iovino and Oppermann, 2014). In Scott Slovic’s definition, ecocriticism is “the study of explicitly environmental texts by way of any scholarly approach or, conversely, the scrutiny of ecological implications and human-nature relationships in any literary text, even texts that seem, at first glance, oblivious of the nonhuman world” (2000, p. 160). In spite of the astounding evolution of ecocriticism over the last decades as “an earth-centred approach to literary studies” (Glotfelty, 1996, p. xix), as such labels as Deep Ecology, Ecofeminism, Social Ecology and Eco-Marxism, Heideggerian Eco-Philosophy, Material Ecocriticism, Postcolonial Ecocriticism or Animal Studies seem to suggest, what remains uncontested is the centrality of the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment to a genuine understanding of (non)human nature. Ecocriticism is, therefore, a promising field of literary study and a sort of crossroads where metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and politics converge in fruitful ways. 

Given “the capacity of environmental texts to model ecocentric thinking” (Buell, 1995, p. 143), they can act as catalysers for action that quicken environmentalist commitment and may change the world for the better. In the face of the ubiquitous depredations of neoliberal capitalism, literary texts have the “capacity to set out symbolic guidelines for the material transformation of the world” (Huggan and Tiffin, 2015, p. 14), as “there is no social justice without ecological justice” (p. 37). Imaginative literature can be thus turned into “a catalyst for social action” (p. 12), inasmuch as it can “make exploitation and discrimination of all kinds, both human and nonhuman, visible in the world; and, in so doing, […] help make them obsolete” (p. 16). In light of massive anthropogenic impacts on the Earth, what is in order is “a stronger ethic of care for the nonhuman environment” (Buell, 2001, p. 6), which will result in a more livable oikos for humans and nonhumans alike.ment” (Buell

As a critical approach, ecocriticism is extremely versatile and is informed by other disciplines such as ecology, environmentalism, history, economics, philosophy, ethics, biopolitics, and psychology. Since the 1990s, it has undergone several variations in overlapping waves and broadened its object of scrutiny to include not only nature writing, romantic poetry and canonical literature, but also a vast range of literary texts and cultural manifestations such as theatre, film, TV series, and videogames. In The future of environmental criticism: Environmental crisis and literary imagination (2005), Buell posited the notion of first- and second-wave ecocriticism (p. 17) for the first time. He considers ecocriticism a gigantic palimpsest, constantly expanding in new directions and gaining in intellectual sophistication as a mode of interpreting literary texts and other cultural artifacts. Whereas first-wave criticism (1980 – present) engaged with natural environments (nonhuman nature and wilderness experience) as represented by “nature writing, ecocentric texts, and natural history” (Johnson, 2009, p. 8), with a clear focus on American and British literature, second-wave ecocriticism (mid-1990s – present) moved from natural to human-made environments, or, in other words, “from unbuilt to built environments, from wilderness to urban landscapes, and ultimately all space” (Johnson, 2009, p. 8). Prototypically, the outlook of second-wave ecocritics is more multicultural in that they engage with literatures around the world and multiple genres (not just with nonfiction or nature writing), focus on cityscapes, and embrace environmental justice. 

With the onset of the 21st century, a third wave of ecocriticism ran parallel to the beginning of the second one (Slovic, 2010, p. 6), propelled forwards by “an impulse toward looking beyond the borders of one’s own ethnic group and national culture” (p. 6). In the “Guest editors’ introduction: The shoulders we stand on: An introduction to ethnicity and ecocriticism,” Adamson and Slovic propose a third wave (2000 – present) in the evolution of ecocriticism “which recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries; this third wave explores all facets of human experience from an environmental viewpoint” (2009, pp. 6-7). To Slovic’s mind, third-wave ecocriticism actively conjoins “cross-cultural comparative impulses and the activist energies of ecofeminist literary criticism and environmental justice ecocriticism” (2010, p. 8).

In his “Editor’s note for the fall 2012 issue of ISLE,” Slovic (2012b) claims that we are now immersed in a fourth wave of ecocriticism (2008 – present): “as we near the end of 2012, […] the material turn in ecocriticism is broadening to the extent that may well represent a new ‘fourth wave of ecocriticism’” (p. 619). The main defining features of this new wave are an emphasis on “the fundamental materiality (the physicality, the consequentiality) of environmental things, places, processes, forces, and experiences. Ranging from studies of climate change literature to examinations of the substance of ecopoetic language, there is a growing pragmatism in ecocritical practice” (2012b, p. 619). This is, Slovic contends, a new mode of “applied ecocriticism” that looks at “basic human behaviours and lifestyle choices, such as eating and locomotion and clothing and dwelling” (2012b, p. 619). The new murmurs of an ecocritical fourth wave in 2008 could be divined, according to Slovic (2012a, p. 443), in Stacy Alaimo’s groundbreaking essay “Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature,” where the ecofeminist scholar posits the notion of ‘trans-corporeality’ in pondering the “‘contact zone’ between human corporeality and more-than-human nature” (2008, p. 238). Alaimo writes that “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, [which] underlines the extent to which the corporeal substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (2008, p. 238). Irrespective of the various waves ecocriticism has gone through, it remains a timely critical response to the unprecedented climate crisis humankind is faced with nowadays.

References

Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. Pantheon.

Adamson, J., & Slovic, S. (2009). Guest editors’ introduction: The shoulders we stand on: An introduction to ethnicity and ecocriticism. MELUS, 34(2), 5-24.

Bate, J. (1991). Romantic ecology: Wordsworth and the environmental tradition. Routledge.

Buell, L. (1995). Writing for an endangered world: Literature, culture, and environment in the U.S. and beyond. Harvard University Press.

Buell, L. (2005). The future of environmental criticism: Environmental crisis and literary imagination. Blackwell Publishing.

Coupe, L. (Ed.). (2000).  The green studies reader: From romanticism to ecocriticism. Routledge.

Crutzen, P. J., & Stoermer, E. F. (2000). The Anthropocene. Global Change Newsletter, 41, 12-13. 

Garrard, G. (2004). Ecocriticism. Routledge.

Glotfelty, C., & Fromm, H. (Eds.). (1996). The ecocriticism reader: landmarks in literary ecology. University of Georgia Press.

Glotfelty, C. (1996). Introduction: Literary studies in an age of environmental crisis. In C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm (Eds.), The ecocriticism reader: Landmarks in literary ecology (pp. xv-xxxvii). University of Georgia Press.

Huggan, G., & Tiffin, H. (2015). Postcolonial ecocriticism. Literature, animals, environment. Routledge.

Iovino, S., & Oppermann, S. (Eds.). (2014). Material ecocriticism. Indiana University Press.

Johnson, L. (2009). Greening the library: The fundamentals and future of ecocriticism. Choice, 47, 7-13.

Rueckert, W. (1978). Literature and ecology: An experiment in ecocriticism. Iowa Review, 9(1), 71-86.

Slovic, S. (2000). Ecocriticism: Containing multitudes, practising doctrine. In L. Coupe (Ed.), The green studies reader: From romanticism to ecocriticism (pp. 160-163). Routledge.

Slovic, S. (2010). The third wave of ecocriticism: North American reflections on the current phase of the discipline. Ecozon@, 1(1), 4-10.

Slovic, S. (2012a). Editor’s note for the summer 2012 issue of ISLE. ISLE, 19(3), 443-444.

Slovic, S. (2012b). Editor’s note for the fall 2012 issue of ISLE. ISLE, 19(4), 619-621.