chapter 2 American Ecocriticism and the Ethics of Commitment
François Gavillon
Abstract
It is apparent that contemporary American nature writing and environmental fiction have, for decades, evinced a trait that Lawrence Buell sees as definitory: “Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.” The best of the environmental essays and fictions of the late twentieth, early twenty-first centu- ries share an implicit, and often, explicit, ethical configuration wherein human agency calls for responsibility, respect, and care. Has literary criticism, and ecocriticism in particular, engaged this ethically charged literature with a similar sense of responsi- bility and commitment? Are ecocritical discourses intrinsically ethical, intrinsically committed and transformative? It is the aim of this article to answer these questions by considering some of today’s most stimulating discussions, among ecofeminists and environmental justice actors, in particular, and by examining related fields such as bioregionalism and animal rights. This study will show that environmental criticism reveals, indeed, an ethical orientation which results in various types of engagement (intellectual, and sometimes physical) and in theoretical and social commitment.
Keywords
Alaimo, Stacy – animal rights – bioregionalism – Buell, Lawrence – carnophallogo- centrism (Derrida) – commitment – Derrida, Jacques – Diamond, Cora – ecoethics – ecofeminism – ecologocentrism (Timothy Morton) – environmental justice – ethics – Glotfelty, Cheryll – Lynch, Tom – material feminism – Morton, Timothy – Nussbaum, Martha – placedness – Plumwood, Val – Reed, T.V – Slovic, Scott – Sunstein, Cass – Sze, Julie – Warren, Karen – Wolfe, Cary
At the end of the 1980s, Martha Nussbaum called for a literary theory which would include the study of the practical and ethical dimension of a literary work, and not only its formal or “aesthetic” aspect (assuming that the aesthetic appreciation can be wholly separate from practical experience). She envisioned
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“a future in which literary theory (while not forgetting its many other pursuits) will also join with ethical theory in pursuit of the question, ‘How should one live?’” (1990: 168). Despite the critical works of John Rawls, Stanley Cavell, F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling among others, she noted the absence of an ethical viewpoint (“The Absence of the Ethical”) in the literary criticism of the 20th century, from formalism and the New Criticism up until postmodernist criti- cism. For many followers of the latter, correlating the text to real life (to the author’s biography for example) or seeing in it a form of practical discourse amounted to heresy. This was an insult to the beautiful derealized (inter) textuality of the text.
It was assumed that any work that attempts to ask of a literary text ques- tions about how we might live, treating the work as addressed to the reader’s practical interests and needs, and as being in some sense about our lives, must be helplessly naive, reactionary, and insensitive to the complexities of literary form and intertextual referentiality. (20)
Yet, for the last twenty years or so, the idea that literature can, in its way, teach us something about the human condition and explain our behavior— “literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all” (171)—has become more and more widely spread. During the period when Martha Nussbaum was calling for a philosophi- cal revision of literary criticism, it may not have been a coincidence that Cheryll Glotfelty obtained (in 1990) the first position for “Literature and the Environment” at the University of Nevada in Reno. During the same years, environmental literature was appearing in conference programs, as in a spe- cial session of the Modern Language Association entitled “Ecocriticism: The Greening of Literary Studies” in 1991, and then the following year during the conference of the American Literature Association. In 1992, Scott Slovic, Cheryll Glotfelty and others founded ASLE, The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.1 Today, these scholars are known, like many of
1 The stated mission of the association is “to promote the understanding of nature and culture for a sustainable world by fostering a community of scholars, teachers, and writers who study the relationships among literature, culture, and the physical environment. ASLE seeks to support the above mission by: supporting academic research, teaching, and creative work in environmental literature, arts, and humanities; fostering an active and energetic community through conferences, networks, publications, and other forums; reaching across national, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries to enhance diversity and inclusiveness; and maintain- ing and advocating ecologically sustainable practices.” (http://www.asle.org/site/about/ [last accessed 12/15/2014]).