The State of Environmental Literary Criticism

Abstract

In recent years, field of ecocriticism burgeoned and gone through various stages of theoretical refinement and institutional recognition. Although it is still most dominant in English and other language departments, its development is multiform, and it is possible to tell history of ecocriticism in many ways.1 It is not aim of this study to give extensive account of these various developments. It rather sets out to join recent theoretical developments in ecocriticism by adding perspective of literary and aesthetic theory. While in 2006 Louise Westling could rightfully describe ecocriticism as undertheorized (Westling 2006: 28), I agree with Goodbody and Rigby, who in their recent collection Ecocritical Theory welcome fact that the alleged ecocritical antipathy to theory is on wane (2011: 1). The question remains, however, which one of various theoretical approaches can best be brought to fruition without ignoring basic tenets of ecocritical objectives.In order to explain choice of theoretical approaches and my interest in literary form as well as choice of literary texts (that is, texts that could be subsumed under heading of ?postcolonial literature'), critical discussion of some of dominant developments within ecocritical debates seems pertinent. Due to increase in ecocritical theory, ecocriticism today incorporates materialist and poststructuralist posits alike, and its former hostility towards ?theory' been replaced by desire to hold wide range of theoretical perspectives. As it were, ecocriticism now contains whole spectrum of academic theory.Naturally, this new diversity leads to quite different scholarly aims, Ursula Heise (2006) observes. While Greg Garrard sees central challenge in a redefinition of relationship between science and green cultural studies (Heise 2006: 294),2 Lawrence Buell maintains that ecocritical view has succeeded in opening up new textual archives [...] comparable to that of feminist or black studies (295). Both stances are valuable, but they are problematic as well. Ecocriticism's affiliation with scientific theory, its interest in political and civil activism and some ecocritics' demands for redefinition of canon tend to instrumentalise literature in ways that run risk of us losing sight of role, and what could tentatively be called function, of fiction in context of both aesthetic and ethical discourses. This is weakness of ecocriticism as possible theoretical paradigm that I want to address in this study.Heise seems to be equally aware of this weakness when she claims that[e]cocriticism, arguably, not reached this stage [of overarching theoretical paradigm]; it not yet demonstrated how its particular concerns over nonhuman world under threat might reshape study of texts and artifacts that do not explicitly engage with nature. (Heise 2006: 296)Coming to similar conclusion, Philip Armstrong, in his discussion of animal motifs in modem fiction, complains of of methodological vocabulary (2008: 103) that literary analysis of animality in fiction would require. Indeed, I believe that ecocriticism will be unable to account for this lack as long as it only sparsely and often insufficiently concentrates on genuinely fictional, aesthetic elements of literature and potential that arises from these elements. In what follows, I outline my suggestions for this dilemma.I will begin by tracing development of ecocritical debate back to point that I call - somewhat hyperbolically - ?enlightened dead-end'. Despite suggestion of ?dead-end', I hope to show that situation of ecocriticism as I see it is not as bleak as it might appear, and that by no means does ecocriticism have to be an academic discourse so arcane it no readers at all (Cohen 2004: 29). The contrary is case: very form of fiction allows us to discuss and negotiate aporias of environmental and ecocritical thinking in terms of harmonising potential of imaginative literature - if its status as aesthetic discourse is taken into account. …