Abstract
Ecocritical scholarship has always had pedagogical ambitions. It is commonly assumed that education based on ecocritical readings of literature will change the attitudes and actions of pupils and students and thus contribute to forming environmentally aware and sustainable citizens. However, this article proposes an alternative view on the interaction between sustainability and literature education. Based on a critical discussion of “ecocritical orthodoxy,” this meta-theoretical study uses affect theory in conjunction with Rita Felski’s proposal for postcritical reading to argue that literature education needs to take the polysemy of literary texts and the unpredictability of readers’ encounters with such texts into account. By linking this to a specified set of sustainability competences and a dialogic concept of literary competence, the aim of the main discussion is to highlight the many potentially fertile overlaps between literature education and the competences needed in a sustainable citizen. Here, Timothy Clark’s thoughts on the Anthropocene as threshold concept, and Timothy Clark’s views on irony are important parts of the theoretical framework. Moreover, such a framework for sustainable literary competence could help to argue for the value of literature education and genuine literary competence.
Highlights
A common assumption in ecocriticism is that reading literary texts shapes the reader’s beliefs and attitudes
The preceding discussion has been an attempt to overturn the usual question of ecocritical pedagogy: not “what can literature do for education for sustainability (ES)?” but “what can ES
Do for literary education?” the preceding discussion constitutes an attempt to produce a theoretical framework for a sustainable literary competence
Summary
A common assumption in ecocriticism is that reading literary texts shapes the reader’s beliefs and attitudes. There is a need for a more fundamental theoretical discussion of the relations between literature, literary ethics, and education for sustainability (ES). Humanities 2020, 9, 141 relate to the “social” and “natural” lifeworld This is a core concern of sustainability, following the definition offered by the Brundtland commission as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” I describe how a literary ethics based on undecidability, darkness, and risk (Lesnick 2006; Morton 2007, 2012; Serpell 2014) makes salient the connections between literary ethics and ecological thought (Morton 2010, 2012) This in turn forms the basis for identifying important points of connection between literary competence and the desired competences of a sustainable citizen. The main objective of the article is to explore the following question: What are the pedagogically useful links between imaginative literature, literary competence, and ecological thinking?
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