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The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ecocriticism Author(S): Ursula K The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ecocriticism Author(s): Ursula K. Heise Source: PMLA, Vol. 121, No. 2 (Mar., 2006), pp. 503-516 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25486328 . Accessed: 22/09/2014 14:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 80.47.196.219 on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 14:37:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 12 1.2 the changing profession The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ecocriticism The Emergenceof Ecocriticism URSULAK. HEISE THEFIRST FEW FRAMES OF THEBELGIAN COMIC-STRIP ARTIST RAYMOND MACHEROTSWORK "LES CROQUILLARDS" (1957) PROVIDE A SHORTHAND for some of the issues that concern environmentally oriented criticism, one of themost recent fields of research to have emerged from the rap idly diversifying matrix of literary and cultural studies in the 1990s. A a on heron is prompted to lyrical reflection the change of seasons by a leaf that gently floats down to the surface of his pond (see the next p.): "Ah! the poetry of autumn... dying leaves,wind, departing birds-" This last thought jolts him back to reality: "But?I'm a migratory bird myself!... Good grief!What've I been thinking?" And offhe takes on his voyage south, only to be hailed by the protagonists, the field rats Chlorophylle and Minimum (the latter under the spell of a bad cold), a who hitch ride toAfrica with him. "Are you traveling on business?" our he asks his newfound passengers. "No, for health," they answer. scene The unfolds around two conceptual turns relevant to eco criticism. The speaking animal, a staple of comic strips, is credited an with aesthetic perception of nature that relies on the longWestern tradition of associating beauty with ephemerality: autumn's appeal arises from its proximity to death, decay, and departure, a beauty an thewind will carry away in instant. But ironically this Romantic valuation of nature separates the heron from his innate attunement to its rhythms: the falling leafmakes him sink into autumnal rev erie and forget to seek out warmer latitudes. As soon as he takes once flight, however, Macherot again twists the idea of seasonal mi URSULA K. HEISE, associate professor a of and literature gration by turning the heron into sort of jetliner on bird wings English comparative at Stanford is the author transporting what might be business or leisure travelers.What is (or University, of Chronoschisms: Time, and should be) natural for the bird is not so for the rats, whose illness Narrative, Postmodernism UP, hints at another to (Cambridge 1997). type of failure adapt to seasonal rhythms. On one She is finishing a book manuscript this comic raises the an hand, strip humorously question whether entitled "Sense of Place and Sense of aesthetic of nature one closer to it or alienates appreciation brings Planet: The Environmental Imagination one on from it; the other, ithighlights the tension between bonds to of the Global." ? 2006 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 5?3 This content downloaded from 80.47.196.219 on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 14:37:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 504The Hitchhiker'sGuide to EcocriticismPMLA e nature are 0 that established by innate instinct, cesses transformed it? Is it possible to return those that arise tomore if) through aesthetic valuation, ecologically attuned ways of inhab <y are <*. and those that mediated by modern-day iting nature, and what would be the cultural o &. travel. The heron's remains for such a a flight comically prerequisites change? between the vocabularies of na is a are M suspended This sample of issues that often C and In a ture, art, international business. what raised in ecocriticism, rapidly growing field '5b c ways do highly evolved and self-aware beings in literary studies. The story of its institutional relate to nature? What roles do lit formation has been told in detail and from v language, erature, and art play in this relation? How several perspectives (Cohen 9-14; Garrard 3 have modernization and globalization pro 15; Glotfelty, "Introduction" xvii-xviii, xxii *1T^,i_e^eN-r.LesoisB^ox fpbf^Mu^^^ il^^iMBIi^Sj^^Silsi^Sill This content downloaded from 80.47.196.219 on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 14:37:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions i2i.2 Ursula K. Heise 505 xxiv; Love 1-5; Branch and Slovic xiv-xvii):1 succeeded in establishing a lasting presence scattered projects and publications involving in the political sphere.Why this delay? the connection between literature and the en The main reason lies no doubt in the de y vironment in the 1980s led to the of of between the late 3 founding velopment literary theory W ASLE, theAssociation for the Study of Litera 1960s and the early 1990s. Under the influence 3 a conven ture and the Environment, during of mostly French philosophies of language, tion of theWestern Literature Association in critics this took a fresh literary during period 0 * 1992. In 1993 the journal ISLE: Interdisciplin look at questions of representation, textuality, $ was v* ary Studies inLiterature and Environment narrative, identity, subjectivity, and histori 0 established, and in 1995 ASLE started hold cal discourse from a fundamentally skepti 3 ing biennial conferences. Seminal texts and cal perspective that emphasized themultiple as anthologies such Lawrence Buell's The En disjunctures between forms of representation vironmental Imagination (1995), Kate Soper's and the realities they purported to refer to. In What Is Nature? (1995), and Cheryll Glotfelty this intellectual context, the notion of nature and Harold Fromm's Ecocriticism Reader tended to be approached as a sociocultural as as is construct (1996) followed, well special journal that had historically often served sues (Murphy, Ecology, Ecocriticism). At the to legitimize the ideological claims of specific same time, newly minted ecocritics began to social groups. From Roland Barthes's call in trace concerns the origins of their intellectual 1957 "always to strip down Nature, its Taws' back to in so such seminal works American and and its 'limits,' as to expose History there, as British literary studies Henry Nash Smith's and finally to posit Nature as itselfhistorical" Virgin Land (1950), Leo Marx's TheMachine (Mythologies 175; trans, mine) to Graeme in theGarden (1964), Roderick Nash's Wilder Turner's claim in 1990 that "Cultural Studies ness and theAmerican Mind (1967), Raymond defines itself in part... through its ability to Williams's The Country and the City (1973), explode the category of'the natural'" (qtd. in Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival Hochman 10), the bulk of cultural criticism and Annette The was on an (1974), Kolodny's Lay of the premised overarching project of Land ASLE (1975). membership grew rapidly, denaturalization. This perspective obviously a topping thousand in the early years of the did not encourage connections with a social new and century, offspring organizations in movement aiming to reground human cul Australia-New Zealand, Korea, Japan, India, tures in natural systems and whose primary and the United were as was to rescue a sense re Kingdom founded, pragmatic goal of the most was, recently, the independent European ality of environmental degradation from the Association for the Study of Literature, Cul obfuscations of political discourse. ture and Environment (EASLCE). By the early 1990s, however, the theoreti Given the of cal in steadily increasing urgency panorama literary studies had changed environmental evermore problems for closely considerably. New historicism had shaded into interconnected societies around the American globe, cultural studies, which styled itself the of articles and books in the field as explosion antitheoretical much as theoretical, sig not one as may strike particularly surprising. naling not so much the advent of a new para But what is remarkable about this burst ac as of digm the transition of the discipline into a ademic interest is that it took at such a field of place diverse specialties and methodologies late most of the move no date; important social longer ruled by any dominant framework. ments of the 1960s and 1970s left theirmarks Ecocriticism found its place among this ex on criticism before environmen literary long panding matrix of coexisting projects, which talism even environmentalism in did, though part explains the theoretical diversity it This content downloaded from 80.47.196.219 on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 14:37:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 506 The Hitchhiker'sGuide to Ecocriticism PMLA c has attained in a mere dozen But awareness. 0 years. this public Ecocriticism, with its triple \A also results from its to diversity relation the allegiance to the scientific study of nature, the sociopolitical forces that spawned it.Unlike of cultural 0 scholarly analysis representations, feminism or ecocriticism did and the formore sustain a postcolonialism, political struggle not evolve as the w gradually academic wing of able ways of inhabiting the natural world, was c an influential political movement. It born in the shadow of this Even w emerged controversy. c when environmentalism had turned the of the debate have shifted fB already though grounds JE into a vast field of and since then, the issues of realism U converging conflicting underlying projects and given rise to two other humanis and representation that informed the science tic wars subdisciplines, environmental philosophy continue to pose challenges for ecocriti and history.
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