When it comes to literary scholarship, there are several different approaches one can take to analyze a text. Such approaches focalize discussions and suggest the implications of a text in regards to a certain topic.
Our campus has brilliant scholars working with ecocritism and ecocritical readings. At an English department lecture called “What’s Literary About Ecocriticism?” that took place last Friday, we had the privilege of hearing about this topic from several members of our English faculty: Fran Dolan, Hsuan Hsu, Tobias Menely, Elizabeth Miller, Katie Peterson, Margaret Ronda, and Mike Ziser.
Okay but what is ecocriticism?
Good question! In a very broad sense, ecocriticism is the study of how environmental concerns affect human beings. When reading literature, one can track the language surrounding the descriptions of non-human entities and see how it provides a commentary on the conditions of human lives.
For example, one can take an ecocritical approach to reading Juliana Spahr’s book of poetry This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, which explores humanity’s relationship to each other before and after a tragedy. One poem focuses on this question in the wake of 9/11. When we breathe in this time, we are breathing in the dust, smoke, chemicals, and other particles that are present because of this tragedy. The physical environment suffers. Our physical bodies suffer as well, but we are connected through the act of breathing in non-living air. This collective consumption and susceptibility to the contaminated air is also representative of how much emotional contamination and pain we take in after such a devastating event in our shared history. Human beings are bound together because of how we interact with nature. It is the non-living that connects us to the living.
Professor Margaret Ronda is one of the English department’s poet-scholars, and her discussion surrounding ecocriticism involves looking closely at a poem’s “genre and figure”. Her study of ecopoetics (poetry related to ecological concerns) explores several questions about how poetry gives nature a voice, where it places responsibility for ecological damage, and how it elegizes environmental disaster. Such questions give nature a certain kind of visibility, but through an ecocritical reading of certain texts, we can see their relevance to our world more clearly. Nature is personified oftentimes to reflect its human-like presence in the world. The Romantic poets used nature as a means of projecting emotions onto thus, most likely revealing how they felt nature’s sentience.
My personal favorite part of this lecture was Professor Hsu’s discussion of “olfactory ecocriticism”, which basically means defining places and environments in regards to smell. To build on this concept further, paying close attention to a literary description of the physical composition of the air also reveals elements of society and its concerns.
One question raised at this lecture was how ecocritical readings can make literary scholars and writers into activists. This idea of labeling a reading as activism was not wholly accepted as accurate; however, I personally believe that words and thoughts are a form of activism. The term activist can be broadened significantly to include those who represent societal and ecological concerns in art, literature, music, etc. Even if the author of an analytical essay or a literary work does not intend for the work to provoke any action, the impact upon a reader may actually do so. If we consider thought as a form of action, then are ecocritical readings, ruminations over the state of nature, also a form of environmental activism?
It’s often a little tricky to label oneself as an activist, especially since the term activism is so often associated with a certain kind of aggression. When people write and interpret literature, however, it is anything but passive. In the same way, our environments are not passive entities. They provide us with a medium of connecting with each other that our conventional forms of communication cannot. It’s time that we read through an ecocritical lens and remember that we cannot underestimate the capacity of art and literature to inspire tremendous change.
After all, change is only natural.
Referenced Text:
Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems. Berkeley: U of California, 2005. Print.