Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Nature, Culture and Literature 3)

NATURE IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Nature, Culture and Literature 03

General Editors: Hubert van den Berg (University of Groningen) Axel Goodbody (University of Bath) Marcel Wissenburg (University of Nijmegen)

Advisory Board: Jonathan Bate (University of Warwick) Hartmut Böhme (Humboldt University, Berlin) Heinrich Detering (University of Kiel) Andrew Dobson (Keele University) Marius de Geus (Leiden University) Terry Gifford (University of Leeds) Demetri Kantarelis (Assumption College, Worcester MA) Richard Kerridge (Bath Spa University College) Michiel Korthals (Wageningen University) Svend Erik Larsen (University of Aarhus) Patrick Murphy (University of Central Florida) Kate Rigby (Monash University) Avner de-Shalit (Hebrew University Jerusalem) Piers Stephens (Michigan State University) Nina Witoszek (University of Oslo)

NATURE IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

TRANSATLANTIC CONVERSATIONS ON ECOCRITICISM

Edited by

Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Cover Design: Erick de Jong The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-10: 90-420-2096-2 ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2096-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer Nature in literary and cultural studies: defining the subject of ecocriticism – an introduction

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THEORIZING THE NATURE OF ECOCRITICISM Louise Westling Literature, the environment, and the question of the posthuman

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Hubert Zapf The state of ecocriticism and the function of literature as cultural ecology

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Christa Grewe-Volpp Nature “out there” and as “a social player”: some basic consequences for a literary ecocritical analysis

71

Simone Birgitt Hartmann Feminist and postcolonial perspectives on ecocriticism in a Canadian context: toward a ‘situated’ literary theory and practice of ecofeminism and environmental justi

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Sylvia Mayer Literary studies, ecofeminism and environmentalist knowledge production in the humanities

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LOCATING NATURE IN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND EVERDAY CULTURE

Beatrix Busse (Historical) ecolinguistics and literary analysis

131

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Hannes Bergthaller “Trees are what everyone needs:” The Lorax, anthropocentrism, and the problem of mimesis

155

Ursula K. Heise Afterglow: Chernobyl and the everyday

177

Christine Gerhardt “Syllabled to us for names”: Native American echoes in Walt Whitman’s green poetics

209

Tonia L. Payne “We are dirt: we are earth”: Ursula Le Guin and the problem of extraterrestrialism

229

Christian Krug Virtual tourism: the consumption of natural and digital environments

249

Andrew A. Liston Gertrud Leutenegger’s metanoic narrative Kontinent

275

NATURE, LITERATURE AND THE SPACE OF THE NATIONAL Irena Ragaišien÷ Nature/place, memory, and identity in the poetry of Lithuanian émigré Danut÷ Paškevičiūt÷

291

Colin Riordan German literature, nature and modernity before 1914

313

Caroline Delph Nature and nationalism in the writings of Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860)

331

Simon Meacher It was shown in the way they stepped in the woods: nature in Hermann Löns and Edward Thomas

355

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Katharine Griffiths The aesthetic appreciation of nature as a reaction to dictatorship: disjunction and dissidence in the Inner Emigration 373 Axel Goodbody From egocentrism to ecocentrism: nature and morality in German writing in the 1980s 393

ETHICS OF NATURE Patrick D. Murphy Grounding anotherness and answerability through allonational ecoliterature formations

417

Thomas Claviez Ecology as moral stand(s): environmental ethics, Western moral philosophy, and the problem of the Other

435

Timo Maran Where do your borders lie? Reflections on the semiotical ethics of nature

455

Notes on contributors

477

Index

485

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Nature in literary and cultural studies: defining the subject of ecocriticism – an introduction Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer Over the last one and a half decades, ecocriticism has evolved from a regional movement of Western American literature scholars interested in drawing attention to the cultural value of nature writing and environmental literature into a growing international and interdisciplinary community of scholars who agree that the current environmental crisis is the troubling material expression of modern culture’s philosophical assumptions, epistemological convictions, aesthetic principles, and ethical imperatives. A rather loosely defined and fiercely contested term during its inception in the early 1990s – was it the mere application of ecological concepts to literary and cultural studies, a blueprint for political environmentalism, or something else entirely? – ecocriticism entered the new century on equal terms with such established methodologies as structuralism, new historicism, feminism, psychoanalytic criticism and postcolonial theory. At least this is what Peter Barry suggests with the inclusion of ecocriticism in the second, revised edition of his Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (2002). Barry defines ecocriticism as a critical enterprise rooted in environmentalist revisions of U.S.American nature writing and 19th-century Transcendentalism (with a particular focus on Emerson, Thoreau and Fuller), and of the British tradition of late 18th-century Romanticism (most prominently represented by Wordsworth). While we, the editors of this volume, endorse the representation of ecocriticism as a theoretical and methodological force that focuses on real and imagined boundaries between nature and culture without denying nature’s physical existence, we disagree with Barry’s charac-

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terization of ecocriticism as a project that “turn[s] away from the ‘social constructivism’ and ‘linguistic determinism’ of dominant literary theories” (Barry 2002: 264). Rather, with this volume we hope to push ecocriticism’s theoretical and conceptual limits towards a more rigorous investigation of nature, not as a concept that reinforces but one that challenges established cultural, political and ethical normativities. In other words: We strongly support the further development of ecocriticism as a methodology that re-examines the history of ideologically, aesthetically, and ethically motivated conceptualisations of nature, of the function of its constructions and metaphorisations in literary and other cultural practices, and of the potential effects these discursive, imaginative constructions have on our bodies as well as our natural and cultural environments. In doing so, we hope to continue a transatlantic conversation that has been underway since the closing decade of the 20th century, mostly among U.S.-American and British ecocritics who work in the fields of American and British studies. We also wish to expand this conversation by providing space for new voices (from Germany, Estonia, and Lithuania) and subject areas (literatures in German, ecologically oriented linguistics). The vitality of the ongoing ecocritical exchange manifests itself in an increasing number of publications by an ever-growing number of scholars on all continents. Ecocritical books and essays have begun to fill libraries, so that, at this point in time, any attempt at listing the most important names and titles would inadvertently result in involuntary omissions and accidental oversights. This caveat notwithstanding, we would like to briefly discuss three earlier essay collections, all of which continue the work of Glotfelty and Fromm’s pivotal Ecocriticism Reader (1996) and which represent current developments in a particularly poignant manner: Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells’ Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature (1998), Laurence Coupe’s The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (2000), and Karla Armbruster and Kathleen Wallace’s Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (2001).1 Important precursors of the present volume, these collections 1

Of course, ecocriticism’s conceptual and methodological evolution extends far beyond the boundaries of these three anthologies. In the bibliography at the end of this

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are united in their effort to expand the scope of ecocriticism beyond its initial task of opening “the literary canon to a fuller sampling of nature writing and the literature of place” (Kern 2000: 9). The smallest common denominator among these volumes is a shared interest in bringing nature (and the natural environment) back to public attention through the critical examination of its function in the discourses of literature, popular culture, and philosophy. Spurred by a growing sense of ecological crisis (a crisis most notably symbolized in the late 1980s and 1990s by the Chernobyl disaster, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the potential hazards of the so-called mad cow disease, and at the beginning of the 21st century by the devastating effects of so-called ‘natural catastrophes’ such as tsunamis, hurricanes, and wild fires as well as new epidemics like SARS and Bird Flue), Cheryll Glotfelty’s rather broad definition of ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (Glotfelty and Fromm: 1996, xvii) soon proved in need of conceptual refinement. Echoing Lawrence Buell’s observation that “the environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination” (Buell 1995: 2), Richard Kerridge characterized ecocriticism as a project that “seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis” (Kerridge and Sammells 1998: 5). By implication, this definition challenges dominant modernist assumptions about literature and art as aesthetically and ethically autonomous entities. And such a position entails a critical reassessment of the functional relationship between cultural ‘texts’ and their material referents, i.e., a re-evaluation of mimesis and representation as core categories of literary and cultural criticism. Laurence Coupe takes the discussion to yet another level, stating that “green studies is much more than a revival of mimesis: it is a new kind of pragmatics” (Coupe 2000: 4). For Coupe, ecocriticism’s ultimate objective should be to encourage resistance rather than conservation – “resistance to planetary pollution and degradation” (ibid.), a politically charged demand that presupposes changes in established patterns of thought and behaviour brought about by an introduction, we include additional publications that we think are of great value to the project of ecocriticism. The selection is, however, restricted to publications in English.

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(eco-)critical inspection of culture’s discursive relationship to nature. For as Coupe also insists, “green studies does not challenge the notion that human beings make sense of the world through language, but rather the self-serving inference that nature is nothing more than a linguistic construct” (3). If the forms and functions of literary and cultural representation in an era of environmental crisis provide the major conceptual nodes in Kerridge and Sammells’ Writing the Environment and Coupe’s Green Studies Reader, Armbruster and Wallace challenge another of ecocriticism’s early shortcomings: the limitation of its critical scope to nature writing and the literature of wilderness. They are concerned that by focusing on “the study of one genre – the personal narratives of the Anglo-American nature writing tradition – or to one physical landscape – the ostensibly untrammelled American wilderness”, ecocritics risk “seriously misrepresenting the significance of multiple natural and built environments to writers with other ethnic, national, or racial affiliations” (Armbruster and Wallace 2001: 7). For Armbruster and Wallace, the inclusion of urban, ethnic, and national perspectives in an ecological approach to literary and cultural studies is necessary in order to avoid ecoriticism’s theoretical and conceptual self-marginalisation in the larger space of the humanities, while at the same time, it allows ecocritics to reveal the historical and ideological (mis-)appropriations of nature as a justification for systems of cultural and social oppression. The ideas and concepts emerging from these collections provide crucial stepping stones for developing ecocriticism into an efficacious, competitive, and innovative methodology in literary and cultural studies. And yet, as Louise Westling observes in her contribution to the present volume, the field is still undertheorized (see p. 26). In other words, our critical trade still lacks the precision instruments that would allow us to produce reliable theories on the historically, politically, and socially mutable relationship between culture and nature, or more accurately, between various cultures and their respective notions of nature. While we do not claim to supply the definitive remedy for this problem, as editors of the present volume we seek to further the discussion about the theoretical foundations of ecocriticism by asking a set of related questions: How and to what effect is nature conceptualized in various cultural, critical, and

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disciplinary contexts? How and to what effect are concepts of the natural and the human related to each other? What is the relationship between nature, language, art, and literature? And last but not least: What are the conditions and presuppositions under which nature can be re-established as a subject of literary and cultural criticism? The individual essays in the present collection approach these questions from various directions. They represent extended versions of a selection of papers given at a conference held at the University of Münster (Germany) in March 2004.2 The conference was organized to “position ecocriticism”, i.e., to evaluate ecocriticism’s theoretical and practical productivity and locate it within the changing landscape of international literary and cultural studies. This collection is divided into four thematic sections: (1) “Theorising the Nature of Ecocriticsm” offers proposals for rethinking both the cultural function and the subject of literary studies from an ecological perspective, which includes a re-evaluation of nature’s double-character as material phenomenon and aesthetically charged category; (2) “Locating Nature in Language, Literature, and Everyday Culture” examines specific literary and cultural texts, asking how and to what effect they represent nature and the environment in a time and age of postindustrialism, environmental crises and virtual realities; (3) focusing on literary traditions of Germany and Lithuania, “Nature, Literature, and the Space of the National” offers analyses of the politically and ideologically ambiguous, at times controversial relation of the natural and the national; and (4) the essays in “The Ethics of Nature” discuss the philosophical, political, and semiotic prerequisites for charting a postmodern, post-colonial ethics of nature. Addressing questions as diverse as literary representation and mimesis, the function of literary culture, pragmatics, narratology, and semiotics, all contributors are united in an effort to investigate the epistemological, poetological, linguistic, and ethical complexities involved in any discussion of ‘nature’. While nature may continue to exist even after the demise of human culture, it will not be the same nature that existed before the appearance of humans on the evolutio2 The papers were originally given in English. A selection of the papers given in German was published as Natur-Kultur-Text: Beiträge zu Ökologie und Literaturwissenschaft. Eds. Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2005).

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nary stage. Similarly, the ways we perceive, interact with and ultimately change nature cannot be detached from who we are in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, nationality, and geographical location. Unlike Edward Abbey, the editors of this collection do not think it is possible to enter the ‘wild’ space of nature and “evade for a while the clamour and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus”.3 On every hike into the world of nature – whether we actually, physically move through the landscape, or stay at home on the couch and watch a wilderness programme on TV or read a scholarly article in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment – we carry minds full of cultural values, norms, and attitudes that inform the ways in which we see, know, represent, inhabit, and, ultimately, reconstruct nature. At the beginning of the 21st century it no longer makes sense to think of nature and culture in oppositional terms. Rather, we should start to conceive of the pair as hybridized entities, as Dana Phillips has recently suggested. Purism, whether cloaked in the celebratory fashions of naturalism or culturalism, always runs the risk of ideological intolerance. We agree with Jonathan Bate’s remark in his “Foreword” to the Green Studies Reader, that the “relationship between nature and culture is the key intellectual problem of the twenty-first century. A clear and critical thinking of the problem will be crucial to humankind’s future in the age of biotechnology” (Coupe 2000: xvii). In the concluding sections of this introduction, we would like to draw attention to three scholars whose work we consider as being of particular value for ecocriticsm’s further theoretical development: Gregory Bateson, Kate Soper, and Gernot Böhme. The author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), Bateson is certainly the most widely recognized of these three critics; Soper is best known for her What Is Nature? (1995), a book most often cited by European environmental philosophers and ecofeminists, while Böhme’s numerous books and essays on the philosophy and aesthetics of nature (some of which are written in collaboration with his brother Hartmut, professor of literary and cultural studies in Berlin), are only available to a Germanspeaking audience. Inspired by different cultural, historical, and 3

See Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (New York: Ballentine Books, 1968; emphasis in the original), 6.

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political contexts, the works of Bateson, Soper, and Böhme can contribute in significant ways to the theoretical advancement of the ecocritical project. First published 1972, Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind is a synthesis of political, cultural, and theoretical concerns as they emerged in the transatlantic world of the 1950s and 1960s. Influenced by the environmental, anti-war, and civil rights movements of the 1960s and inspired by the interdisciplinary approaches of systems theory, Bateson’s major concern in Steps was the re-articulation of the relationship between mind and matter and, based on that, a re-definition of mind itself. The concept of ecology provided the framework for this project. Coined by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, ecology was a term that drew epistemological attention to the relationship between biological bodies or organisms and their animate and inanimate environments. The definition of ecology as “the science of communities”4 in the early 20th century made it possible later in the century to metaphorize the term and apply it to sociological and cultural investigations of the relationship between individuals, communities and their (natural and built) environments. At the risk of stultifying the term’s theoretical edge, Bateson defined ecology as “the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs […] in circuits” (Bateson 2000: 491). Yet at the same time, ecology’s conceptual expansion into the realm of metaphor opened the door for a re-definition of mind as a principle that is “immanent” (493) to all structures and objects, be they natural or cultural. Paraphrasing Bateson’s work in the “Foreword” to The University of Chicago Press’ republication of Steps in 2000, his daughter Catherine Bateson observed that for her father “the ecology of mind is an ecology of pattern, information, and ideas that happen to be embodied in things— material forms” (x). More than simply the secularized version of an autonomous, metaphysical power that regulates all human affairs, Bateson’s “mind” becomes a synonym for a cybernetic system, one in which individual body, society, and ecosystem interact and communicate with each other for the purpose of survival. 4

According to Donald Worster, this definition was provided by Victor Shelford in 1919, at the time working as an ecologist at the University of Illinois (see Worster 1998: 204).

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While Bateson was not explicitly concerned with a methodological reform of literary and cultural studies, his concept of an ecology of mind, which emphasizes communicative relationships within and among highly complex bio-social systems, allows us to frame the ecocritical project as one that investigates aesthetic representations, discursive performances, and cultural functions of nature in historically, racially, and socially diverse communities and societies. One of the major theoretical inspirations for reconceptualising nature comes from British environmental philosopher Kate Soper. In What Is Nature? (1995), she outlines the major philosophical routes pursued by modern discourses of nature and marks the intellectual and ideological traps set in a politically contested, conceptual territory. Echoing Wittgenstein, Soper describes the philosopher’s task as one that is investigative rather than prescriptive. She points out that “it may be a mistaken approach to the meaning of terms to attempt to specify how they should be employed as opposed to exploring the way in which they are actually used” (Soper 1995: 20; emphasis in the original). For her, there can be “no adequate attempt […] to explore ‘what nature is’ that is not centrally concerned with what it has been said to be” (21; emphasis in the original). Surveying the major trends in philosophical conceptualizations and ideological appropriations of nature in the tradition of modern European thinking, she diagnoses two principal philosophical paradigms. From a cosmological, Neoplatonist perspective, nature is “conceived […] as the totality of being” (22), a definition that appears to be valuable to contemporary ecological debates because it locates humanity within rather than in opposition to nature. Soper sees a parallel between “the idea of plenitude, diversity and organic interconnection informing the idea of [the Great] Chain [of Being]” (25) with current debates about eco-systemic interdependency and the necessity to maintain bio-diversity. While she recognizes a valuable, proto-ecological tradition within Western philosophical thinking, Soper at the same time is fully aware of “the hierarchical ranking of species that is the organizing principle of the Great Chain” (ibid.). Consequently, any political claim to the cosmological paradigm involves the critical reformulation of its conceptual core. The second paradigm that Soper subjects to a critical revision concerns conceptualizations of ‘human nature’. During the Enlighten-

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ment, nature was defined as that which is chaotic, unruly, and unpredictable and, therefore, in need of being contained, improved, and corrected by civilization. This stance drew major opposition in the Romantic age when nature, now perceived as “an essentially innocent and benevolent power” and the source of ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’ was engaged as an ethically and aesthetically normative measure of human conduct. Soper cautions against the dangers and pitfalls inherent in either of these two modern approaches to nature. While the Enlightenment idea of human emancipation from nature enabled the development of inalienable human rights such as freedom and individual self-realization, it also privileges “mind over body, the rational over the affective” (31). The Romantic concept of liberating (human) nature from the constrictive power of culture and civilization is marked by a similar ambivalence: on the one hand, it inspired the emancipatory social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s as well as the environmental movement; on the other hand it was and continues to be “a component of all forms of racism, tribalism and nationalism” (32), ideologies that call upon nature to castigate ‘deviations’ from social, sexual, and racial norms. For Soper, nature is more than “what takes place without the voluntary and intentional agency of man,” a definition she found in John Stuart Mill’s 1874 essay on “Nature”. In addition to being that which exists outside the reach of the human will, it is also a functionally multivalent, historically complex, and ideologically paradoxical concept. Soper points out that “the use of ‘nature’ as if it referred to an independent and permanent order of reality embodies a kind of error, or failure to register the history of the legitimating function it has played in human culture” (34). The implied definition of nature as both material reality and ideologically charged concept, as representable object and discursive function is crucial for the further development of ecocriticism’s theoretical foundations. Soper’s philosophical approach recommends itself to the ecocritical project because it acknowledges nature as an entity independent of human culture, and, at the same time, keeps in focus “the impact on the environment of the different historical modes of ‘human’ interaction with it” (19). Gernot Böhme’s work is solidly anchored in the tradition of German aesthetic philosophy. More specifically, in his outline of an “ecological aesthetics of nature”, Böhme builds upon some of the

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major tenets of Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic theory.5 While Kant’s critique of judgement still relied on the concept of beauty as an intrinsic value of nature, for Hegel beauty in nature was merely an imperfect expression (or, as we would say today, simulation) of beauty in art. Adorno laments the expulsion of nature from aesthetic theory, liberates the philosophy of the aesthetic from its Hegelian constriction to a philosophy of art, and, as Böhme points out, reestablishes the aesthetic as a direct mode of experiencing and knowing nature. Based on the insight that current environmental problems resulted in a growing realisation of the natural (or organic) conditions of human existence, Böhme calls for a reformulation of aesthetic theory, not as a conversation about works of art that serves the exclusive purpose of evaluation, but as an ontologized mode of aesthetic perception (Wahrnehmung), a concept which he defines as “the sensual existence in environments” (“das sinnliche Befinden in Umgebungen”, 1989: 10). The English landscape garden serves as the paradigmatic embodiment of an ecological aesthetics of nature. Described by Kant as a concrete form of landscape painting, landscape gardening – like painting – produces more or less idealized images of nature. However, where the painter uses paint, the gardener uses plants and other materials to create his or her portrait of nature. Thus, for the gardener it becomes necessary to decide if and to what degree growth should be curtailed or integrated into the design. Both painter and gardener create atmospheres which, in one way or another, appeal to their audiences; yet only the gardener’s work attends to the entire spectrum of the human senses: one can see the landscape, hear wind and water, smell the flower, touch the bark of the tree, and taste the berry (which, in some places, may require the violation of park regulations). In contrast, the painter’s work can only be looked at, seen. Its appeal is merely visual. Entering an English landscape garden (or any other, similar landscape type), the human individual will be confronted with 5

While some of Böhme’s philosophical pieces on ethics are available in English as Ethics in Context: The Art of Dealing with Serious Questions (2001), his studies in aesthetic philosophy are only accessible in German. In addition to Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik (1989) and Atmosphären (1995), Böhme’s Natürlich Natur: Über Natur im Zeitalter der technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (1992) provides new, ecological approaches to a philosophy of nature.

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a staged, dramatized, ‘civilized’ version of nature, but one in which nature will always remain one of the lead actors: plants that grow and change their forms and colours with the seasons are part of the design. While the gardens of the French Baroque exemplify the degradation of nature to the status of mere raw material and its concomitant subjugation under the rules of mathematical beauty (i.e., of lines, squares, angles, and perfect circles), the creation of beauty in an English landscape garden involves what Böhme, drawing on Ernst Bloch, calls “technologies of alliance”, i.e., the co-operative interaction between nature and culture.6 Like Bateson’s ecology of mind, Böhme’s ecological aesthetics of nature seeks to overcome existing conceptual rifts between nature and culture. Unlike Bateson, for whom the theoretical reintegration of mind into nature is essential to the project of ecological reformation, Böhme focuses on the body as the fulcrum in re-articulations of the nature-culture relationship. Endowed with sensual consciousness (Sinnbewußtsein), the body becomes the medium through which nature, or rather, the idea of nature, can be reintegrated into concepts of the human self.7 Although approaching their goal from different directions, Bateson and Böhme are united with Soper in their endeavour to treat what Bateson called the pathologies of epistemology, a terminology he employed to refer to the disruption of communicative feedback loops between mind and matter, nature and culture. As an ecologically inspired approach to literary and cultural studies, ecocriticism can participate in such a project, one that needs to be, as are the essays in this volume, a transatlantic, transnational endeavour. 6 “Die Natur ist hier [im Landschaftsgarten] nicht bloß Material für menschlichen Gestaltungswillen. Die Selbsttätigkeit der Natur wird geachtet und trägt zum Zustandekommen des Werkes bei. Man ist geneigt, mit Ernst Bloch die Landschaftsgärtnerei eine Allianztechnik zu nennen” (Böhme 1989: 87). 7 Demanding a careful analysis and critique of existing aesthetic theories, Böhme writes: “Die Beziehung von neuer Naturphilosophie und Naturästhetik liegt tiefer. Es geht im Grunde um das ‘Sichbefinden des Menschen in Umwelten’. Die durch den Menschen veränderte natürliche Umwelt wird für ihn nur deshalb zum Problem, weil er das Destruktive dieser Veränderungen nun am eigenen Leib zu spüren bekommt. Das bringt ihm, dem Menschen, zu Bewußtsein, daß er selbst als leiblich sinnliches Wesen existiert, und zwingt ihn, diese seine eigene Natürlichkeit wieder in sein Selbstbewußtsein zu integrieren” (1995: 9).

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Selected Bibliography Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans and Rachel Stein (eds). 2002. The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy. Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press. Alaimo, Stacy. 2000. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Armbruster Karla & Kathleen R. Wallace (eds). 2001. Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism. Charlottesville, Va: University of Virginia Press. Barry, Peter. 2002. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 2nd revised edition. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press. Bate, Jonathan. 1991. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London and New York: Routledge. Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. 1972. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Böhme, Gernot. 1989. Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. —. 1992. Natürlich Natur: Über Natur im Zeitalter der technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. —. 1995. Atmosphäre. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. —. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. —. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing. Campbell, SueEllen. 1996. “The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet.” The Ecocriticism Reader, 124-136. Coupe, Lawrence (ed.). 2000. The Green Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Cronon, William (ed.). 1996. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Evernden, Neil. 1992. The Social Creation of Nature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Gaard, Greta and Patrick D. Murphy (eds). 1998. Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Glotfelty, Cheryl and Harold Fromm (eds). 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press. Goodbody, Axel (ed.). 2002. The Culture of German Environmentalism: Anxieties, Visions, Realities. New York: Berghahn Books. Kerridge, Richard and Neil Sammells (eds). 1998. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. London: Zed Books. Kern, Robert. 2000. “Ecocriticism – What Is It Good For?” ISLE 7.1 (Winter): 9-32.

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Krebs, Angelika. Ethics of Nature. A Map. 1999. Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter. Kroeber, Karl. 1994. Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind. New York: Columbia University Press. Love, Glen. “Ecocriticism and Science: Toward Consilience”. New Literary History 30.3 (1999): 561-76. Mayer, Sylvia (ed.). 2003. Restoring the Connection to the Natural World: Essays on the African American Environmental Imagination. Münster/Berlin: Lit Verlag. Mazel, David. 2000. American Literary Environmentalism. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press. Merchant, Carolyn. 1980. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francsico: Harper & Row. Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture and Literature in America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London and New York: Routledge. Riordan, Colin. 1997. Green Thought in German Culture. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” 1978. The Ecocriticism Reader, 103-123. Soper, Kate. 1995. What Is Nature? Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human. Oxford: Blackwell. Stein, Rachel. 1997. Shifting the Ground: American Women Wirters’ Revision of Nature, Gender, and Race. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. Tallmadge, Richard and Henry Harrington (eds). 2000. Reading Under the Sign of Nature. New Essays in Ecocriticism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Warren, Karen J. (ed.). 1997. Ecofeminism: Woman, Culture, Nature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Westling, Louise H. 1996. The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. White, Daniel R. Postmodern Ecology: Communication, Evolution, and Play. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998. Worster, Donald. 1998. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Second edition. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press.

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THEORIZING THE NATURE OF ECOCRITICISM

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Literature, the environment, and the question of the posthuman Louise Westling Abstract: Recent theoretical emphasis on ‘the posthuman’ radically destabilises humanist pretensions to superiority over other forms of life and the illusion of human separation from the rest of nature which have haunted ecocriticism since its origins a little over a decade ago, and Western thought since Plato. After a brief history of ecocriticism, this essay describes twentieth-century philosophy’s efforts to break down humanist dualisms, in parallel with the discoveries of physics that show the relativism and interrelationship of observer and phenomena observed. John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are presented as the two modern philosophers whose work embraces the implications of evolutionary biology and quantum physics, to turn towards genuinely ecological perspectives upon the human place in the world. Their work prepared the way for posthumanist theorists like Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Donna Haraway, and Cary Wolfe, who now begin to explore the deep ecological relationships between homo sapiens and the larger community of earth’s life. Merleau-Ponty defines language and literature as growing out of what we humans see as “silence” in the world around us, but which is actually a landscape overrun with words. Virginia Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts, is discussed as an example of literary performance of this ecological vision of literature’s chiasmic participation in the communal conversation, or singing, of the planet’s web of life.

A growing impetus in postmodern theory focused on ‘the posthuman’ shows promise in helping us to move beyond the problem of anthropocentrism, or human-centered elitism, that has haunted ecocriticism since its beginnings in the U.S. fifteen years ago, as indeed it has haunted Western philosophy for most of its history. We cannot see the world from outside our own situation, of course, but perhaps, as Cary Wolfe has recently suggested, we now know that the “‘human’ […] is not now, and never was, itself” (xiii). That is, anthropos has never been the stable entity that our culture has assumed for the past several hundred years. Since Darwin and

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Einstein philosophers and critical theorists have been working to dismantle the Renaissance and Enlightenment humanist presumptions about homo sapiens that have led to our conceptual estrangement from the matrix of earth’s life. Some have made especially bold efforts to question or erase the boundaries that humanism set up between our kind and the other animals; their work prepared the way for the posthuman theorists who now begin to explore the deep ecological relationships between the cultures of homo sapiens and the larger community of life on the planet. That lineage, and its significance for ecocriticism, is what I want to sketch out here. First, a brief reminder of ecocriticism’s own lineage may provide useful context. Then I will introduce “the posthuman” movement, and try to demonstrate its relationship to earlier work in phenomenology and modernist fiction, particularly in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts. 1. Ecocriticism Ecocriticism developed out of more traditional scholarship about literary treatments of the natural world, such as studies of European pastoral and of the American nature writing genre practiced by authors from Jefferson and Bartram to Thoreau and Muir. It is not surprising that ecocriticism first emerged in the United States, because Americans have been obsessed with the landscapes of the ‘New World’ since European exploration of the continent began. Writers of the young American republic grounded their claims for cultural uniqueness on presumptions of unmediated access to Nature, as in Emerson’s famous essay of that name. Critical studies of these tendencies, such as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, and Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land, were proto-ecocritical works which inspired more recent scholars to shape specifically environmentalist approaches to literature. In 1978, William Rueckert introduced the term “ecocriticism” in an article that appeared in the Iowa Review called “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” A decade later, in 1989, Glen A. Love called for “an ecological literary criticism” in his presidential address to the Western American Literature Association, published the following year in Western American Literature. Glen Love inspired a group of young scholars

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who met in 1992 and founded the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment to promote “the exchange of ideas and information pertaining to literature [and interdisciplinary environmental research] that considers the relationship between human beings and the natural world” (Glotfelty 1996: xviii). In only a decade this organization has grown to 1,000 members from 20 countries, with affiliated branches in Japan, Australia, the UK, Korea, and now Central Europe. The movement which it represents has developed rapidly in sophistication from a predominantly celebratory attention to nature writing, to a wide variety of more critical approaches to every kind of literature from around the globe. Familiar traditions of writing about place and setting are now being reexamined from environmental perspectives – for example Medieval European narratives of pilgrimage, Old Irish poetry of place – dinshenshas –, the European pastoral, Chinese and Japanese traditions of nature poetry, narratives of exploration from the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Theoretically, ecocritics are reevaluating the Kantian Sublime and other Romantic concepts of Nature in European and American nineteenth-century literature. Rigorous attention to twentieth-century theoretical approaches such as pragmatism, phenomenology, and various modes of poststructuralism informs vigorous debates about the relations of humans to the other animals, calling into question long traditions of human exceptionalism. Efforts to link ecocriticism with the sciences are also proving fruitful, with intellectual historians exploring interrelations between nineteenth-century natural science and writers like Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Hardy. Studies of Darwin’s influence upon nature writers and poets proliferate, and scholars of Modernism have also discussed the impact of Darwin as well as general relativity theory and quantum mechanics upon poets and novelists of the early decades of the twentieth century. More recently, ecocritics in the U.S. have devoted increased attention to the genre of ‘environmental justice literature’ in which Latino writers of the Southwest and Native Americans from many regions are especially prominent. Simon Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Rudolfo Anaya, and Ana Castillo are just a few whose work can be placed in this category. Because it is a new critical movement, ecocriticism is still working to define itself

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precisely, and many serious problems have yet to be resolved. The field is undertheorized, it is marked especially in the U.S. by a virile privilege in unconscious collusion with imperial and industrial forces, it often relies upon a naive realism and an unconscious Cartesian separation of the human ‘Me’ from the exoticized ‘Not me’ of a static and reified nature, and it has yet to seriously engage the technologized urban environments where most of its practitioners live. But increasingly, these problems are being addressed.1 At the heart of these problems is the need for a radical reevaluation of the concept of the human and the meaning of literary culture, in its relation to the so-called ‘natural’ world of which it is a part. Jean François Lyotard asks the key questions in The Inhuman (1988): “what if human beings, in humanism’s sense, were in the process of, constrained into, becoming inhuman (that’s the first part)? And (the second part), what if what is ‘proper’ to humankind were to be inhabited by the inhuman (2; emphasis added)?” What is “proper” to humankind has been assumed ever since Pico della Mirandola’s 1487 manifesto, On the Dignity of Man, to be our species’ radical selfshaping ability to either descend into vegetative or brutish material states, or ascend into a disembodied spiritual realm higher than that of the angels (7-11). The refinement of such presumptions, most notably in Déscartes’ systematic theory of human Mind outside a mechanistic, material Nature has shaped a powerful Humanist definition of people as superior beings whose language and self-reflective consciousness place them above and at an abyssal remove from all other animals and the natural world. Although the critique of such Humanism has been a central project of twentieth-century philosophers such as Dewey, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, it has not yet succeeded. Husserl and Heidegger, in particular, never moved beyond a human bias. Derrida points this out very carefully as early as 1983, in his “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand” (173-4), and around the same time, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were destabilizing the boundaries between humans and other animals in A Thousand Plateaus (1980 original French publication). American theorists and poets such as Paul Shepard, Donna Haraway, and Gary Snyder were 1

For a lengthier review of the present state of ecocriticism, see Michael Cohen’s “Blues in the Green: Ecocriticism under Critique.” in Environmental History.

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working in different idioms towards similar ends from the 1970s. Leading American proponents of the new Posthumanist movement N. Katherine Hayles and Cary Wolfe are much influenced by Derrida, but their work is merging into a current of American discussion that now includes phenomenologists (Lingus), ethologists, animal trainers (Herne), and primatologists (Jolly, De Waal, Smuts) as well as cultural theorists. Cary Wolfe’s new anthology, Zoontologies, (2003) brings a representative sample of this work together. 2. Posthumanism Two main tendencies can be identified in the new posthuman discourse: (1) Techno or Cyborg Posthumanism, and (2) Animot Posthumanism (to borrow a term from Derrida). (1) Techno-posthumanism is perhaps the best-known manifestation of the new movement. One of its earliest formulations was Donna Haraway’s controversial cyborg manifeso of 1985, and as we have seen, Lyotard raised his questions about the destabilisation of the human a few years later. A flurry of new books naming the Posthuman as a phenomenon began to appear in 1999, with N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, as perhaps the best known.2 These studies suggest a cyborg vision of the posthuman, opening the prospect of escape from bodily limitations and environmental constraints through computerised virtual reality, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and biotic mechanisation. But a redefinition of our species as beings fused with the technologies and media experiences we have designed as tools seems only further elaboration of the Cartesian mechanistic definition of humans as transcendent minds manipulating a realm of material otherness. Such a posthuman 2

See also Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002); Chris Hables Gray, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (2001); Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, Posthuman Bodies (1995); Akira Mizuta Lippitt, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000); R. L.Rutsky, High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (1999); Vivian Sobchack, Meta Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change (2000); and Catherine Waldby, The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine (2000).

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vision does nothing to address the dilemmas posed by a threatened environment, but instead implies that we can escape involvement in the rhythms of growth and decay in the biosphere. The techno posthuman does not seem to offer much to ecocriticism. (2) The other approach to the question of the posthuman leads in a very different direction, and it is here that I think ecocriticism can find promising new theoretical possibilities, for it helps to define the human place within the ecosystem by interrogating or erasing the boundary that has been assumed to set our species apart from the rest of the living community. Jacques Derrida has been carefully exploring questions about this boundary for at least twenty years – ever since “Geschlecht II” in 1983 – and particularly the question of our relation to other animals. In a 2002 essay, “The Animal that therefore I Am (More to Follow)” [L’Animal que donc je suis (à suivre)], he insists that it is ridiculous even to speak of “the animal” as if there were any such monolithic presence. Instead there are millions of other beings whom we must begin to take seriously. He thinks back to his Renaissance predecessor Montaigne in this enterprise, and he begins as Montaigne does in the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” with a question about his relationship with his cat. Montaigne’s purpose was to ridicule the pretensions of human superiority over the other animals, and he prefaced his characteristic catalogues of examples from classical and modern authors by wondering whether, “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me? […] This defect that hinders communication between them and us, why is it not just as much ours as theirs?” (2002: 331). Derrida updates Montaigne’s questioning of his cat’s (and by extension all animals’) intelligence and agency by contemplating his own shame before his little cat’s gaze upon his naked body (372-4). This playfully Freudian scene strips away the layers of protection and privilege beneath which we have hidden our bodily animal selves, and Derrida is careful to insist upon his cat as a real, rather than a figural being. “It doesn’t silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth” (2002: 374), or for some composite of all animal Others. The gaze of this particular cat is one instance of “the gaze called animal [that] offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman,” a bordercrossing from which vantage point a person can announce herself to herself, or himself to himself (2002:

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381). Thinking back through the history of European culture, Derrida identifies the philosophical tradition which jealously guards the boundaries of the human (383) and locates part of its grounding in the Biblical Genesis story in which Elohim subjugated all living creatures to the husbandry of Adam and granted their naming to him (2002: 384-5). Western philosophy has continued to assume this superior role, down to Heidegger’s description of man as the shepherd of Being in contrast to animals existing without Dasein, language, or a sense of time. “Isn’t that history,” Derrida asks, “the one that man tells himself, the history of the philosophical animal, of the animal for the manphilosopher”(2002: 391)? Derrida opens wide the question of the human relation to animals, arguing that we must “worry all these concepts, more than just problematise them” (2002: 393). We must explore the question, he asserts, understanding that beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than ‘the Animal’ or ‘Animal Life,’ there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, […] a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead, relations of organization or lack of organization among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death (399).

Hence he proposes the word animot in order to capture some of that bewildering range of beings and states, punning on the French plural for ‘animal’ (animaux) and also calling attention to the limitations of words in human languages for naming the many Others with whom we share the world (405-9). Having dissolved the presumptions of philosophical tradition, he comes at the end of the essay to ask the following questions: The animal in general, what is it? What does that mean? Who is it? To what does that ‘it’ correspond? To whom? Who responds to whom? Who responds in and to the common, general and singular name of what they thus blithely call the ‘animal’? Who is it that responds? The reference made by this what or who regarding me in the name of the animal, what is said in the name of the animal when one appeals to the name of the animal, that is what needs to be exposed, in all its nudity, in the nudity or destitution of whoever, opening the page of an autobiography, says, ‘here I am.’ ‘But as for me, who am I (following)? (418)

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Derrida takes us a long way from the semi-divine agent of Humanism here, but we have to go beyond this point, to ask how our full ecological participation in the world might be understood.3 3. Phenomenology Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed such a perspective half a century ago, following the lead of Edmund Husserl who identified the impossibility of Humanist dualism in his Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl’s disciples Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty both spent their lives trying to erase those dualisms of mind/body and human/nature, but as we saw above, Heidegger never succeeded in moving beyond them. He did turn back to ordinary lived experience as the place where Being comes into presence, but he still insisted that our species exists in the unique realm of language, Dasein, where we are separated by an abyss from any other living thing. For Heidegger, humans are the shepherds of Being who can spare and save the Earth with our dwelling (1977b: 220-1; 1977c: 310-7; 1977a: 326-9). Not only are we the only creatures with language, but even the human body is set apart from the animal realm (1968: 16; cf. Derrida 1987: 168-76 and Lippit 2000: 5566). He could not bear to think of what he considered the appalling bodily kinship we share with the other animals, claiming that, “The human body is something essentially other than an animal organism” (1977b: 204). One of the most famous examples of his notion of the abyss separating humans from animals is the claim that primates do not have hands. “The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs – paws, claws, or fangs – different by an abyss of essence,” Heidegger claims in What Is Called Thinking? “Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft” (1968: 16). Derrida, in his essay “Geschlecht

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Other recent studies considering human/animal relationships are Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (2004); Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton, Animal Philosophy: Readings in Continental Thought (2004); Alfonso Lingus, “Animal Body, Inhuman Face;” Floyd Merrell, Sensing Corporeally: Toward a Posthuman Understanding (2003); and Peter H. Steeves, Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, (1999).

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II”of 1983, shows the arrogance and scientific ignorance of this blatantly Humanist claim. Like most of those who, as philosophers or persons of good sense, speak of animality, Heidegger takes no account of a certain ‘zoological knowledge’ that accumulates, is differentiated, and becomes more refined concerning what is brought together under this so general and confused word animality. […] This nonknowing raised to a tranquil knowing, then exhibited as essential proposition about the essence of an ape’s prehensile organs, an ape that would have no hand, this is not only, in its form, a kind of empirico-dogmatic ∀Β∀> 8,(≅:,