Literature and the Environment
Dr. Gary Harrison
The main purpose of "Literature and the Environment" was to provide fellows with an opportunity to discuss the basic premises and principles of ecological literary criticism (ecocriticism) and to try out those principles upon some key works of environmental nonfiction and fiction, focusing particularly upon the Southwest and New Mexico. In addition, through reading the first nine chapters of Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination, as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, and Mary Austin's Land of Little Rain, the seminar offered a critical and historical introduction to American environmental writing in general, focusing particularly upon the ideological function of "nature" as a privileged construct in American thought, as well as to the role literature plays in shaping and reshaping environmental perception in American culture. Grounding our discussion in an understanding of the pastoral, georgic, and agrarian constructs of nature evidenced in the nineteenth-century American literary tradition, we followed Buell's example to ask what a truly ecocentric literature might be, whether such a literature might be desirable, and how it might shape our environmental perception in such a way as to promote an ecocentric environmental ethic.
Having considered key motifs, such as the machine in the garden and the country versus the city, having discussed key concepts such as the sense of place and nature's personhood, and having become attuned to the way ethnicity, gender, and historical contingencies influence the way we write and think about the natural world, we studied three key texts that dramatize the encounter between culture and nature: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, Fabiola Cabeza De Baca’s We Fed Them Cactus, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. From our initial readings in Buell, Emerson, Thoreau, Abbey, and Austin, we were able to place these three works into the trajectory of American nature writing and to articulate clearly the way ideology, ethnicity, and gender influenced the literary treatment of land and nature in these works. Moreover, drawing upon the ethnic and historical diversity represented in these novels, we explored how the arid landscape of the Southwest places special demands upon those who dwell here, how different cultures solve the problem of living on these lands, and how these cultures have transformed the landscape both imaginatively and actually. Finally, we weighed the relative degree of ecocentrism and anthropocentrism among these works, as we asked which of them most clearly models an ecologically responsible relationship to the environment and most emphatically or persuasively calls upon us to think ecocentrically.
To place each of these three works into critical perspective, we also read supplemental
essays by Judith Fryer, Tey Diana Rebolledo, and Silko, focusing upon the cultural and
historical issues related to land, landscape, and the environment raised in the works
themselves and in the Anglo-American, Hispanic, and Native American (Pueblo) cultures they
represent. A high point in the seminar was a class visit by Patricia Clark Smith,
Professor of English at UNM, poet, critic, and storyteller, who presented a slide show and
discussion on the land in and around Laguna Pueblo where the action of Ceremony
takes place. Fellows introduced into our discussions several other texts, including the
Bible, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Phillip Dick'sDo Androids Dream of Sheep,
Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, Rachel
Carson's Silent Spring, the poetry of Robert Frost and Pat Mora, Marc Reisner's Cadillac
Desert, as well as many other texts that raise issues pertinent to the study of
ecology and literature.