Response

Abstract

Response Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (bio) Let me begin by expressing gratitude to the editors of Victorian Studies for dedicating this review forum to Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (2021) and for the invitation to reflect on my project in response to and in dialogue with these three reviews. I also want to express my thanks to the reviewers for the time they have spent with my book and its arguments. As a scholar I have learned and benefited from the work of these three critics, and it is a privilege now to be in the position to respond to their responses to my work. Written scholarship is at its most interactive in forums such as this, and from 2020 to 2022, interaction has been a resource in short supply, so I am all the more grateful for the exchange.1 Extraction Ecologies is a study of the rise of industrial extraction and of the ways in which the industrialization of underground resource extraction interacted with literary form and genres from the 1830s to the 1930s. This is the book's particular contribution, but the book is also, more broadly, a prehistory of the literature and culture of climate change and the Anthropocene, one that is intended to explore the roles of language and culture, of genre and discourse, in extenuating and, sometimes, mitigating the environmental degradations of extractive industry and imperial extractivism. How can humanities scholarship possibly intervene in environmental catastrophes of such long duration and awful extent? Contemplating such scales and degrees in the course of writing this book has certainly led me to a perspective of critical humility, which Extraction Ecologies expresses in part by establishing limits on what it attempts to achieve. And yet, in my view—and I presume most readers [End Page 450] of this forum will agree—humanities scholarship can and does work slowly and collaboratively to influence and change language and thought. In terms of this broader goal, Extraction Ecologies is one contribution among many: a book written at the precipice of a new era, feeling and thinking its way toward a new understanding of the modern world, in dialogue with other writers and critics in the environmental humanities. Even should the worst catastrophes be averted in the era to come—and I remain hopeful that they will, despite mounting evidence to the contrary—it is evident that we are living through a moment of acute social and environmental change. Much suffering is already happening; much is yet to come. A beast of some manner of roughness is slouching toward Bethlehem, and whether that roughness translates to two degrees or five degrees Celsius is yet to be determined. Critics witnessing the dawn of this base new world are perhaps inevitably drawn to reconsider the past that birthed this rough beast—including its literary histories. Narrative and discourse are, of course, central to the culture that has produced and been produced by the long exhaustion, to use my term from the book. Such a realization raises questions about the work of criticism: Have we been asking the wrong questions of literature? Has literary criticism been too apt to treat texts as immune from environmental concerns? Has it participated in the pernicious conceptual opposition between humans and nature that many environmental thinkers see at the root of modern ecological crises? Reading texts differently is surely no protection from wildfires, hurricanes, and wet-bulb temperatures, but the way we read texts is a symptom of and a guide for patterns of thought and perception, and it is remarkable, in this moment, to work one's way through a portion of the literary archive and to realize how little of the environmental knowledge of this archive has been reckoned with by critics at all. My book seeks to explore the epistemological and representational dimensions of extractivism, a term that I define in two ways: as, to use my book's words, a "complex of cultural, discursive, economic, environmental, and ideological factors related to the extraction of underground resources on a large, industrial scale" (6), and as, to use Naomi Klein's words, a "resource-depleting model," a "nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the...