How do we consider the role of nature—of place—in literature? Questions of place and the intersection of literature with the material world have become increasingly popular as our planet continues to warm. While nature is at the center of our target, ecocriticism is an essentially postmodern approach to literary texts, intersecting with political critiques we’ve studied in previous sections.

Ecocriticism is a critical approach to literature and culture that focuses on the relationships between human beings and the natural world. It emerged in the 1990s as a response to growing concerns about environmental degradation and the impact of human activity on the planet (Glotfelty and Fromm).

Ecocritics examine the ways in which literature and other cultural forms represent and interact with the natural world. They are interested in exploring the ways in which environmental issues and concerns are reflected in literary texts, considering how literature can be used to raise awareness of environmental issues and promote sustainability and ecological awareness.

Ecocriticism also emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on fields such as biology, ecology, and environmental studies to enrich literary analysis. It seeks to explore the complex and dynamic relationships between human beings and the natural world, and to uncover the ways in which these relationships are shaped by social, cultural, and historical factors.

One of the key principles of ecocriticism is the importance of environmental justice. Ecocritics are interested in exploring the ways in which environmental issues and concerns disproportionately affect marginalized communities, and in how literature can be used to promote social and environmental justice.

Ecocriticism has been influential in a variety of fields, including literature, cultural studies, and environmental studies. It has been used to analyze a wide range of literary works, from classic literature to contemporary eco-fiction, and has been applied to other cultural forms, such as film and art.

To learn more about ecocriticism as a critical approach and to position it in the history of literary studies, let’s look at two excerpts from widely studied ecocritical scholarship. In her introduction to the 1996 book,  The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, Cheryll Glotfelty provides a good working definition of ecocriticism, positioning this critical theory in literary studies and connecting it with other critical approaches we have learned about in this book. She also gives examples of the kinds of questions that ecocritics ask about texts and contexts.

What then is ecocriticism? Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender- conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.

Ecocritics and theorists ask questions like the following: How is nature represented in the sonnet? What role does the physical setting play in the plot of the novel? Are the values expressed in this play consistent with ecological wisdom? How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it? How can we characterize nature writing as a genre? In addition to race, class, and gender, should place become a new critical category? Do men write about nature differently than women do? In what ways has literacy itself affected humankind’s relationship to the natural world? How has the concept of wilderness changed over time? In what ways and to what effect is the environmental crisis seeping into contemporary literature and popular culture? What view of nature informs U.S. Government reports, corporate advertising, and televised nature documentaries, and to what rhetorical effect? What bearing might the science of ecology have on literary studies? How is science itself open to literary analysis? What cross-fertilization is possible between literary studies and environmental discourse in related disciplines such as history, philosophy, psychology, art history, and ethics?

Despite the broad scope of inquiry and desperate levels of sophistication, all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it, and affected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature. As a critical stance it has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the nonhuman.

“Introduction” by Cheryll Glotfelty is excerpted from Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. University of Georgia Press, 1996. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Ecocriticism_Reader/eJj4RlFKWCoC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PR17&printsec=frontcover. All rights reserved. This excerpt is used under the Fair Use exception.

In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism,” published in the mid 2000s when ecocriticism was becoming a popular critical approach to literary texts, Ursula Heise traces the history of ecocritical approaches to texts, noting that individual scholars have been taking this approach at least since the 1970s, but that they often worked in isolation until ecocriticism began to receive more institutional attention in the 1990s.

Given the steadily increasing urgency of environmental problems for ever more closely interconnected societies around the globe, the explosion of articles and books in the field may not strike one as particularly surprising. But what is remarkable about this burst of academic interest is that it took place at such a late date; most of the important social movements of the 1960s and 1970s left their marks on literary criticism long before environmentalism did, even though environmentalism succeeded in establishing a lasting presence in the political sphere. Why this delay? The main reason lies no doubt in the development of literary theory between the late 1960s and the early 1990s. Under the influence of mostly French philosophies of language, literary critics during this period took a fresh look at questions of representation, textuality, narrative, identity, subjectivity, and historical discourse from a fundamentally skeptical perspective that emphasized the multiple disjunctures between forms of representation and the realities they purported to refer to. In this intellectual context, the notion of nature tended to be approached as a sociocultural construct that had historically often served to legitimize the ideological claims of specific social groups. From Roland Barthes’s call in 1957 “always to strip down Nature, its Taws’ and its ‘limits,’ so as to expose History there, and finally to posit Nature as itself historical” (Mythologies 175; trans, mine) to Graeme Turner’s claim in 1990 that “Cultural Studies defines itself in part… through its ability to explode the category of ‘the natural'” (qtd. in Hochman 10), the bulk of cultural criticism was premised on an overarching project of denaturalization. This perspective obviously did not encourage connections with a social movement aiming to reground human cultures in natural systems and whose primary pragmatic goal was to rescue a sense of the reality of environmental degradation from the obfuscations of political discourse.

By the early 1990s, however, the theoretical panorama in literary studies had changed considerably. New historicism had shaded into American cultural studies, which styled itself antitheoretical as much as theoretical, signaling not so much the advent of a new paradigm as the transition of the discipline into a field of diverse specialties and methodologies no longer ruled by any dominant framework. Ecocriticism found its place among this expanding matrix of coexisting projects, which in part explains the theoretical diversity it has attained in a mere dozen years. But this diversity also results from its relation to the sociopolitical forces that spawned it. Unlike feminism or postcolonialism, ecocriticism did not evolve gradually as the academic wing of an influential political movement. It emerged when environmentalism had already turned into a vast field of converging and conflicting projects and given rise to two other humanistic subdisciplines, environmental philosophy and history. This diversity resonates in the different names by which the field has been identified: ecocriticism has imposed itself as a convenient shorthand for what some critics prefer to call environmental criticism, literary-environmental studies, literary ecology, literary environmentalism, or green cultural studies (see Buell, Future 11-12)….

Like feminism and critical race studies, eco criticism started with a critical reconceptualization of modernist notions of human psychological identity and political subject hood. The ecocritical attempt to think beyond conceptual dichotomies that modernity, the Enlightenment, and science were thought to have imposed on Western culture, the separation of subject and object, body and environment, nature and culture, articulated itself, as it did in other fields, through the combination of analytic modes of academic discourse with more experientially based forms of writing that Scott Slovic has called “narrative scholarship” (“Ecocriticism”). But ecocriticism in its first stage differed sharply from other forms of “postmodern” thought in that it sought to redefine the human subject not so much in relation to the human others that subjecthood had traditionally excluded as in relation to the nonhuman world. Environmentalism and ecocriticism aim their critique of modernity at its presumption to know the natural world scientifically, to manipulate it technologically and exploit it economically, and thereby ultimately to create a human sphere apart from it in a historical process that is usually labeled “progress.” This domination strips nature of any value other than as a material resource and commodity and leads to a gradual destruction that may in the end deprive humanity of its basis for subsistence. Such domination empties human life of the significance it had derived from living in and with nature and alienates individuals and communities from their rootedness in place.