In some ways, “green reading” is more American than apple pie, especially because the propagation of trees bearing sweet apples didn’t occur until the nineteenth century. Green writing, or writing in English dealing with the American environment, began with the shaky establishment of Jamestown. Later, what is called “nature writing” became a distinctively American genre. But it has always been considered a minor genre standing apart from the mainstream of American literature.
Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) remains the most brilliant and influential study of the revision, in major works of imaginative literature, of the Western ideal of America as a redemptive garden safe from pollution by “dark satanic mills.” Marx’s book inspired many critics but did not engender a new school of criticism, let alone infiltrate the teaching of literature at any level, until the formation of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) in 1992. Although ecocriticism existed before ASLE, it had no organization identified with it.
The birth of ASLE and ecocriticism was acknowledged outside academe by Jay Parini’s admiring article, “The Greening of the Humanities” (October 1995), in the New York Times. Parini’s title implies a revolution that has not yet happened throughout the humanities, let alone other areas of study. In the nonacademic world, among people who still enjoy literature, green reading remains exceptional.
This seems odd given the paradigm shift in popular culture caused by a fast-growing acceptance of the basic hypotheses of global warming. You don’t have to be an academic to know what a “carbon offset” is. Yet ecocritics are absorbed in doctrinal battles among themselves while the validity of ecocriticism itself, when it attracts attention from outsiders, tends to come under attack.
Here are some questions that occur to me:
· What are the institutional imperatives and entrenched interests that resist ecocriticism as a worthy, non-exclusive approach to literature in its broadest sense and not just to nature writing?
· Can ecocritics find common ground, as scientists studying global warming have done, in spite of their legitimate debates and differences?
· Can green reading—which assumes that literature has a relationship to the environment much as human beings exist in relationship to their environments—become a noncontroversial way to read in a culture of people, at least younger people, dominated by the machine in the garden to the point that they don’t see the garden?
· Can green reading overcome another obstacle in American culture, namely, the large numbers and social power of people who sincerely believe that humans stand apart from nature and that the natural world has little importance compared with the kingdom of God?
Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) remains the most brilliant and influential study of the revision, in major works of imaginative literature, of the Western ideal of America as a redemptive garden safe from pollution by “dark satanic mills.” Marx’s book inspired many critics but did not engender a new school of criticism, let alone infiltrate the teaching of literature at any level, until the formation of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) in 1992. Although ecocriticism existed before ASLE, it had no organization identified with it.
The birth of ASLE and ecocriticism was acknowledged outside academe by Jay Parini’s admiring article, “The Greening of the Humanities” (October 1995), in the New York Times. Parini’s title implies a revolution that has not yet happened throughout the humanities, let alone other areas of study. In the nonacademic world, among people who still enjoy literature, green reading remains exceptional.
This seems odd given the paradigm shift in popular culture caused by a fast-growing acceptance of the basic hypotheses of global warming. You don’t have to be an academic to know what a “carbon offset” is. Yet ecocritics are absorbed in doctrinal battles among themselves while the validity of ecocriticism itself, when it attracts attention from outsiders, tends to come under attack.
Here are some questions that occur to me:
· What are the institutional imperatives and entrenched interests that resist ecocriticism as a worthy, non-exclusive approach to literature in its broadest sense and not just to nature writing?
· Can ecocritics find common ground, as scientists studying global warming have done, in spite of their legitimate debates and differences?
· Can green reading—which assumes that literature has a relationship to the environment much as human beings exist in relationship to their environments—become a noncontroversial way to read in a culture of people, at least younger people, dominated by the machine in the garden to the point that they don’t see the garden?
· Can green reading overcome another obstacle in American culture, namely, the large numbers and social power of people who sincerely believe that humans stand apart from nature and that the natural world has little importance compared with the kingdom of God?
James Fairhall, Department of English
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