University of Jordan Dr. Samira ElKhawaldeh P.hd. Readings in Literary Theories Submitted by: Hind Alem The Problems and Challenges of Ecocriticism Abstract During the last few decades, Environment has posed a great threat to human society as well as to mother earth. As a reaction of man’s anthropocentric attitude towards nature, a new theory came into existence that aims at reading nature and its relation with Man, called Ecocriticism. The present paper seeks to explore the different concepts of this new theory and establish the connection between environmental matters with literary texts. However, as a recent theory, ecocriticism found itself in front of many obstacles when trying to balance between theory and practice. This research attempts to answer the following questions: What are the challenges and problems associated with Ecocriticism? On this light, the present paper will provide a brief history of the emergence of the theory of Ecocriticism and most importantly it will attempt to examine the different problems and challenges faced by Ecocriticism. Keywords: Ecocriticism, challenges, Literary Theory, Nature, Man. Today Ecocriticism refers to a complex set of ideas derived from cultural and literary studies, science and animal studies, ecophilosophy, environmental ethics and history, environmental justice movement, ecofeminism, animal studies, sociology and psychology, and globalism studies, among other academic domains. Although it may seem that all these issues tackled by ecocriticism would make its strength as a theory, many scholars are skeptical about its future due to several challenges and problems within its scope. The present paper presents first of all a brief overview of environmental studies’ history in order to show that the context of its emergence, when issues of race, gender and political instability were dominant, made ecocriticism difficult to emerge as a separate theory. Secondly, by delving into the question of its definitions and labels as well as its methodological gaps, one can understand the difficulty of balancing between theory and practice. Finally, the research attempts to unveil the causes that led ecocriticism to remain under other cultural and literary disciplines. The term “Ecocriticism” was coined in the late 1970 by William Rueckbert in his work Literature and Ecology (24), but its history goes back much further. In fact, according to Lawrence Buell in his work The Future of Ecocriticism, there are several views about its origins. For US settler culture literature for example, one would need to go back at least as far as the 1920s- the decade when it first established itself as a professional area- sometimes said to have “inaugurated the new academic field” of American literature(13). Some other American critics might argue that the origin should be set much earlier, at least as far as Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836), the first canonical work of US literature to unfold a theory of nature with special reference to poetics (ibid). Lawrence Buell, the most prominent American environmental literary critic, has argued in The Future of Environmental Criticism, the field development over the last two decades has in large part been prompted by the need to overcome its early shortcomings and oversights. Ecocriticism first wave, rooted in deep ecology, tended to see nature and human beings as opposed to one another, and held that the proper response of environmental criticism should be to help protect the natural environment from the depredations of human culture (21). This stance yielded in the late 1990s to a second wave which addressed itself to human concerns as well as nonhuman nature; to urban and suburban environments as well as to wilderness settings; and to all types of literary texts, not just signature writing. Prompted by dialogue with the environmental justice movement, second-wave literary critics no longer saw human beings and the environment as opposed to one another, but instead focused on the ways in which they were interdependent and mutually important. Lawrence focuses on the two precontemporary books of literary and cultural studies of important influence for later Anglo-Saxon American environmental crisis: In American studies Leo Marx’s the Machine and the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American Culture (1964), and in the British studies, Raymond Williams well-known work The Country and the City (1973). Marx and Williams both focused on the cultural and literary instantiation of the intertwined history of attitudes toward nature versus urbanism and industrial technology. Moreover, both stressed the appeal of nostalgia for rural landscapes: how the landscapes have been transformed and spoiled by the economic and class interest (Buell 14). The importance of these two books and the essays that succeed them for the subsequent turn in environmental studies lay especially in their identification of the dynamics of the history of what is called national imaginaries in terms of contrasting archetypal landscapes, although they dealt with the subject quite differently. Williams concerned himself much more with the actualities of environmental history and landscape transformation than did Marx, who focused on “myth-symbol” in the school of American studies, according to which the key symbolic. Williams’ heroes were endangered country writers as peasant poet John Clare and regional novelist Thomas Hard, whose works “rendered these most these most faithful, despite the threat of cooptation by the stereotypical green language of romanticism and the false consciousness implanted by difference to patrons or market place”(15). Marx’s heroes, on the other hand, were a small group of high canonical literary writers, from Henry Thoreau to William Faulkner, who practiced a “complex pastoral” against “simple pastoral” by using green symbols to critique advancing machine culture. For Marx, such visions of lost or possible future golden age had “nothing to do with the environment per se”. The play off was entirely political and aesthetic. This useful distinction between the first and second wave of Ecocriticism, formally introduced by Lawrence Buell in his 2005 book on The Future of Environmental Criticism, distinguishes between older (generally speaking, twentieth-century) environmental criticism that was preoccupied with nature writing, wilderness, and texts such as Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and emerging twenty first century work that is often concerned with a variety of landscapes (including places like cities) and more timely environmental issues. Buell drew attention to how this distinction applies to primary texts by noting that “Thoreau is content to sit, contemplate, and ponder the beauties before him . . . [while individuals like Rachel Carson are] . . . apt to actually do something.” Consequently, writers such as Thoreau and Wordsworth, who were the darlings of first-wave environmental criticism, are somewhat less interesting to the second wave. Not surprisingly, second-wave environmental critics, careful not to overly romanticize wilderness (as did many of their predecessors), are more likely to direct themselves to sites of environmental devastation and texts that do the same, such as Carson’s Silent Spring. As it is aforementioned, ecocriticism emerged first of all as a simple interest in the relationship between the individual and nature in the literary works of the romantic period. Starting off with this principle, ecocriticism could not be taken seriously because there were other humanist studies that focused on the struggle and sufferings of the individual in society such as Feminism and Postcolonialism. In order to establish a valid theory, critics have to agree on a consistent and coherent definition and label. A task that was problematic for ecocritics because of the several branches they touched. In The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty defines Ecocriticism as "the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment" (5) and compares it with other cultural studies such as Marxist and feminist criticisms. The Ecocriticism Reader was the first of its kind—a series of ecocritical essays devoted to organizing an area of study whose efforts had, until the early 1990s, not been "recognized as belonging to a distinct critical school or movement"(7). Rather, as Glotfelty points out in the introduction, many of the twenty-five essays collected in the reader had appeared under headings as varied "as American Studies, regionalism, pastoralism, the frontier, human ecology, science and literature, nature in literature, landscape in literature"(ibid). In his interview The Problems of Environmental Crisis, Lawrence Buell argues that for at least two reasons, Ecocriticism is a somewhat confusing and inadequate term (8). For one thing, ”eco” suggests a specifically biotic or natural world emphasis, too narrow to encompass the broad range of environmental interests actually pursued by self identified ecocritics, many of whom are at least as concerned with the built environment and its effects on both human and non-human life forms. And secondly, many literary scholars who are passionately concerned with environmental issues many scholars would object to the label as excessively restrictive, because Ecocriticism in the first instance was used especially to designate a particular kind of literary criticism that focused primarily on nature writing and post-Wordsworthian nature poetry with a view to emphasizing its potential for reconnecting people to nature (10). But Ecocriticism nonetheless the “omnibus term, or nickname, by which environmentally-oriented literary studies is most likely to be known for the foreseeable future; and so retain use of it here” (11). Thus, Buell acknowledges that there is some uncertainty about what the term exactly covers but argues that if one thinks of it as a multiform inquiry extending to a variety of environmentally focused perspectives more expressive of concern to explore environmental issues searchingly than of fixed dogmas about political solutions, then the term ecocriticism becomes a large and growing scholarly field. This point brings the research to another discussion about the problems and challenges concerning this newborn theory, which is its interdisciplinary aspect. Indeed, many scholars argue that besides having methodological issues, ecocriticism fails to stand a separate theory. Simon C. Estok in his study A Report Card on Ecocriticism asserts that like any recently born thing, Ecocriticism is experiencing tremendous growth and development in these early years of its existence. In the short time since it first appeared as a movement, some of the initial concerns that marked its initial moments have already been mentioned: its definition. Glen Love, paraphrasing Glotfelty's point, argues in his contribution to The Ecocriticism Reader that “race, class, and gender are words which we see and hear everywhere at our professional meetings and in our current publications ... [but] the English profession has failed to respond in any significant way to the issue of the environment”(Estok 4). Buell believes that Ecocriticism or environmental criticism lagged behind other cultural disciplines because of a number of reasons. Race, gender, sexuality, and postcolonial studies, one reason, surely, is that environmental imperilment did not become consistently “front-page news” until about the 1980s. Another reason, perhaps equally important, is that environment differs from the others in being a non-human, or, a transhuman entity, and on that account it cannot be self-evident sense a part of personal or social identity (The Future of Ecocriticism 35). Thus it might be argued that environmental criticism would predictably be harder to promote and display than the other cultural disciplines such as Feminism or Postcolonial theories, especially insofar as it involves privileging the welfare of the non-human equally or more than the human. Although, as John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington correctly point out in Reading under the Sign of Nature, theory has taken the front seat in early ecocritical writing (largely because theory, it seems, can authorize and validate the approach), there are some misgivings about and distrust of theory among ecocritics. Hence, Tallmadge and Harrington promise to establish an adequate theory but "without spinning off into obscurantism or idiosyncrasy" (12), and Lawrence Buell pledging to avoid what he terms "mesmerization by literary theory" (The Future of Ecocriticism 111). Given that Ecocriticism is something that is supposed to change things, a healthy skepticism toward theory of the sort seems perfectly valid. Buell's approach, however, is to avoid the complexities of theory entirely, it seems, and to bridge the gap between what he does, in fact, acknowledge as a theoretical problem: the relationship between text on the one hand and world on the other. He calls this bridge an "aesthetics of dual accountability" (98), which will satisfy "the mind and the ethological facts" (93). One of the more promising examples of such an attempt to deal directly with the problems of representation comes from Gretchen Legler's essay in her work Ecofeminist literary criticism, Legler raises a number of deconstructionist questions about the markings of language in Henri David Thoreau’s Walden. Legler deconstructs Walden briefly but effectively by noting how Thoreau represents the natural environment: Nature in Thoreau's work is constructed as a place that nurtures [the] white masculine aesthetic and as a place that is not suitable for the nurturance of other bodies--the bodies of Native Americans, immigrants and white women (Legler 75) Legler helps to connect issues such as race, class, gender, and sexuality in theoretical terms with questions about the environment (Estok 13). Nonetheless, Tallmadge and Harrington are certainly accurate in observing defensiveness toward theory that characterizes early ecocritical discourse (14). The presumption of "a skeptical, if not hostile, reader" (ibid) largely remains with ecocritical discourses, partly because ecocriticism has still not found its own voice and continues to speak through the mouths of other theories, continues, as Tallmadge and Harrington argue, to be "less a method than an attitude, an angle of vision, and a mode of critique" (ibid). Glen Love, too, voices a concern in Ecocriticism and Science about the theoretical standing of ecocriticism. He seems to feel some uncertainty about "what that place of ecocriticism is to be, particularly in its theoretical and methodological base" (65). Stephanie Sarver goes even further in expressing her worries about ecocriticism theoretical viability. Sarver contends that ecocriticism is not a theory at all but is more than anything a focus: Ecocriticism" is ... an unfortunate term because it suggests a new kind of critical theory. The emerging body of work that might be labeled ecocritical is united not by a theory, but by a focus: the environment. This ecocritical work draws on a variety of theories, such as feminist, Marxist, post-structuralist, psychoanalytic and historicist. (15) In a sense, Sarver has a point, but it is a point that may be applied to any kind of theory, indeed, the very theories she mentions as being theories per se: feminism, Marxism, post structuralism, psychoanalysis, and historicism. All of these theories draw heavily on other theories that preceded them (Estok 8). Such borrowing, however, is exactly what goes on in the articulation of a new critical practice. All theories are a synthesis, and Sarver fails to recognize this fact. Still, the argument Sarver is making is valid in so far as it calls ecocriticism to task for not being theorized enough and for being heavily thematic (Estok 14). Why does ecocriticism find difficulties in getting its theoretical footing? In order to answer this question, the research refers to Richard Kerridge, who perceptively suggests in Writing the Environment that one reason is that unlike feminism, with which it otherwise has points in common, environmentalism has difficulty in being a politics of personal liberation or social mobility ... environmentalism has a political weakness in comparison with feminism: it is much harder for environmentalists to make the connection between global threats and individual lives (16). Moreover, Kerridge believes that perhaps one of the reasons for this problematic is that the terms of engagement are less defined with environmental issues than they are with social ones. Well-established terms as misogyny, racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism provide a path of discussion in literary criticism: the terms themselves (by the very fact that they offer a name) authorize discussion and description of recognized topic "misogyny" is hatred of women; "racism," of racial difference; "homophobia," of non-procreative sexualities; and "anti-Semitism," of Jewishness and Jews. But “what should we call a fear and contempt for the environment?”(Kerridge17). Indeed Ecocriticism does not have terms describing the mechanism for the fear that produces such environments. There are number of terms to describe socially oppressive systems of thinking and the social objects of fear and hatred they produce, but when the object is the natural world, there is no single term with which we can begin an organized and informed discussion. A term such as "ecophobia"(18) would allow people to label fear and loathing toward the environment in much the same way that the term "homophobia" marks fear and loathing toward gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Admittedly, there is too much jargon polluting the world of theory, but some kind of terminology and theorization is necessary; otherwise, ecocriticism risks becoming just an empty buzzword (24). It is probably accurate to claim that no one has done more in helping Ecocriticism onto solid theoretical ground than Patrick D. Murphy. As he complains, the problem with Ecocriticism is that too much of it "remains theoretically unsophisticated. Too often, there remains an anti-theoretical, naive, realist attitude expressed in" the work of ecocritics. [19] Arguably, the criticism is as valid today as when it was first made in 1995. In place of theoretically unsophisticated stances, Murphy offers a Bakhtinian "dialogical orientation," which, he maintains, "reinforces the ecofeminist recognition of interdependence and the natural need for diversity" (22). Sarver would argue that this is simply not good enough. In her own words, literary scholars who are environmentalists seem not to be creating a new critical theory; rather, they are drawing on existing theories to illuminate the individual’s understanding of how human interactions with nature are reflected in literature (50). As a conclusion, ecocriticism as a recent theory still struggles to stand as an independent discipline although it is committed on changing things. Due to its wide range of topics, the term “ecocriticism” is considered by some critics as too narrow and confusing as it encompasses only the natural aspect of the study. Another problem faced by ecocriticism is that of its theoretical methodology which seems still undeveloped and inexperienced compared to other cultural studies. Its interdisciplinary aspect also makes ecocriticism still search for an independent voice, instead of being only a mode of vision or critique. Lastly, the biggest challenge faced by ecocriticism is linked to its transhuman feature, that is, a theory that attempts to put equal importance between human and non human beings. Theorists are still trying to build up convincing arguments for the interconnection between human beings and nature. However, regarding the actual circumstances of climate change, pollution, loss of biodiversity, and the waste disposal that causes public health issues, ecocriticism may overcome these challenges and gain an important place in the field of literary theories. Works Cited Glotfelty, Cheryll. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Univ. of Georgia Press, 2009. Estok, Simon C. “A Report Card on Ecocriticism.” The Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, vol. 96, no. 220, ser. 38, Nov. 2001. Fiedorczuk, Julia. "The Problems of Environmental Criticism: An Interview with Lawrence Buell." (2011). Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Blackwell, 2008. Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” 1978, pp. 1–24. Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Sammells. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. Zed, 1998. Murphy, Patrick D. Farther Afield in the Study of Nature-Oriented Literature. Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000. Tallmadge, John, and Henry Harrington. Reading under the Sign of Nature New Essays in Ecocriticism. University of Utah Press, 2000. Sarver, Stephanie. "Environmentalism and literary studies." Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 49.1 (1995): 106-112. Love, Glen A. "Ecocriticism and Science: Toward Consilience?." New Literary History 30.3 (1999): 561-576. Legler, Gretchen T. "Ecofeminist literary criticism." (1997).