Bridging the Great Divide: Ecocritical Theory and the Great Unwashed

Abstract

FOR ALL OF OUR GOOD WORDS, good works, and best intentions, what ecocritical scholars value seems radically at odds with what policy-makers seem to value, and we've got to wonder at some point if we are really making a whit of difference. We realize relative value of ourselves as scholars when a person like George W. Bush can have such a potentially devastating effect on environment by pulling U.S. out of Kyoto Accord and, despite repeated rejections from U.S. Senate, announcing in early February 2004 that he will pressure U.S. Congress to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife refuge to drilling by oil companies. Moreover, we realize that if is to have any effect outside of narrow confines of academia, then it must not only define itself but also address issue of values in ways that connect meaningfully with non-academic world. In terms of theory, it is going to have to stop running and hiding for fear of being rendered hopeless as a political engine. Since 1996, has burgeoned into a huge discipline with many practitioners and followers. The Association for Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) began in 1992 in U.S. under founding principle of inclusivity, and association has since expanded to include branches in UK, Korea, Japan, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. Canada, too, recently joined club with its version of ASLE called ALECC (The Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada / Association pour la litterature, l'environnement, et la culture au Canada). Embracing inclusivity, ASLE seeks all possible connections, as does ecocriticism, so much so, in fact, that it is sometimes difficult to tell where ends and nature studies begins. However, two disciplines do differ in their commitment to praxis. As I have stated elsewhere (see my Report Card), has distinguished itself, debates notwithstanding, first by its ethical stance of commitment to natural world as an important thing rather than simply as an object of thematic study and, secondly, by its commitment to making connections. Ecocriticism may be many other things besides, but it is always at least these two. Like feminist criticism with which it is often allied, maintains an ethical commitment that also implies a commitment to praxis and to direct effects upon material world. Unlike feminist criticism, however, has not been adequately theorized; as Lawrence Buell claimed in 1999, ecocriticism still lacks a paradigm-inaugurating statement like Edward Said's Orientalism (for colonial discourse studies) or Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (for new historicism) (Letter 1091). While Buell sees this as a potential strength, perhaps what we might call strategic intangibility that defined and bolstered ecocriticism's inclusivity principle in late 1990s is counterproductive now and actually threatens to undo ecocriticism. We still seem to be in this phase of strategic intangibility, and perhaps it is time to get beyond it. Possibly one way of doing this is by drawing some distinctions between feminist and ecofeminism and by resisting wholesale inclusion under sign of ecocriticism. One of dangers, of course, is that we will start spinning off into obscurantism or idiosyncrasy (Tallmadge et al. xv) or that we will fall under a spell of mesmerization by literary theory (Buell, Environmental Imagination 111). Canada, despite lacking a long ASLE history, has been especially prolific in area of a clearly feminist ecocriticism, with women such as Pamela Banting, Catriona Sandilands, and Diana Relke perhaps its best representatives. Still, even among foremost scholars in field, whether American or Canadian, though there is a clearly implied intuitive recognition of Ynestra King's claim that the hatred of women and hatred of nature are intimately connected and mutually reinforcing (Toward 118), there is little theoretical distinction between ecofeminism and feminist ecocriticism; yet, two fields each have a very different focus. …