Beyond the text: literary field studies.

Abstract

This article contends that ecocritics need to develop an interdisciplinary, field-based methodology to fully understand works of environmental literature. A variety of methods for studying and teaching environmental literature in the field are suggested and the benefits of each are demonstrated.

Ecocriticism: Promise and Problems

The rapidly growing field of ecocriticism, or literary ecology, has been defined as the study of the relationships between literature, culture, and environment. This emergent discipline was founded in the early 1990's with the establishment of ASLE (the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) and the publication of such ecocritical anthologies as The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. As a distinct field of literary criticism, ecocriticism developed in response to the growing recognition of the significance of American environmental literature, the importance environmental values play in the environmental crisis, and the efficacy with which literature represents and reinforces those values. The development of ecocriticism should be seen as continuing the expansion of literary criticism that has been ongoing since the 1950s. Since that time, the development of such schools of criticism as feminism, post-colonialism, Marxism, and multi-cultural studies has sought to enlarge the literary canon and offer more diverse approaches to the study of literature. While these schools have succeeded in recovering the lost voices of African and Native Americans, and laborers and women, as the editors of Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment note, "the 'voice' longest neglected has been that of our physical environment, the voice of nature, which cannot speak through conventional means" (xii). Like its predecessors, ecocriticism seeks to enlarge the canon and the scope of literary investigation. Unlike other fields of literary criticism though, it seeks to include the non-human natural world within the field of literary studies.

However, while ecocritics have been successful in expanding the literary canon and the lens through which we view works in it, they have remained firmly entrenched in classical--textually based--methods of scholarship and instruction. The need for developing new methods of investigation and instruction becomes clear when we recognize that nature writers often combine information from geology, ecology, psychology, and history with fictional elements and literary techniques to craft their work. From Charles Darwin and Gilbert White to Rachel Carson, and Gary Snyder nature writers approach their own work from an interdisciplinary perspective and thus require critics, and students alike, to be knowledgeable about a number of different fields. As Ian Marshall notes, "[i]f there is a methodology that sets ecocriticism apart from other modes of literary scholarship, it is its inherent interdisciplinary nature" (6). For Marshall, as well as many other critics, such an approach seems required by the inherent interdisciplinarity of the texts they study.

The problem ecocriticism faces today is that a clear methodology for engaging in interdisciplinary literary scholarship has not yet been developed. Many scholars who praise interdisciplinary scholarship do little more than borrow a key term or idea from a companion discipline when it seems convenient. While such a practice crosses disciplinary boundaries, it is not sufficiently critical enough to warrant the praise accorded it in theory. John Tallmadge notes this problem, lamenting the fact that, although ecocritics have made substantial claims of interdisciplinarity, their "underlying method has generally been that used by other [literary] schools, namely, close reading of a primary text, mediated by close reading of other, chiefly literary texts. In other words, the 'eco' refers more often to the content of the work or the purpose of the critic than it does to the critical method itself" (34). A better approach would be to adopt methodologies from other disciplines for gathering data, testing conclusions, and applying solutions. Such an approach, while it would necessitate moving beyond the text, would more successfully fulfill the promise of interdisciplinary thinking, and more fully benefit from its many advantages.

Likewise, as an instructor, one may find it necessary to include field-based experiences for students struggling to understand the relationships between the texts they read and the world they inhabit. During field-studies classes, when the opportunity for such synthesis is offered, students find that reading the text shapes their experiences on the trail, just as hiking the trail influences their perceptions of the text. The ability to study and experience the various species, processes, and physical sensations represented in a text aids students in understanding the author's rhetorical choices, ideas, and experiences. It offers students a depth of understanding that cannot be achieved through textual analysis alone.

Such forms of fieldwork, however, have not traditionally been seen as viable forms of practice for the literary scholar. Within the field of literary studies, it has been tacitly assumed that since the object of study is a text, all necessary information will likewise be found in texts. Such forms of textual primacy are inadequate, however, for the study of texts that focus so pointedly upon extra-textual environments and our responses to them. In Story Line, a place-based study of the literature of the Appalachian Trail, Ian Marshall laments the singularly textual approach, observing that "literary critics in general have neglected fieldwork. If the evidence they seek is not in the library, they don't want to know about it" (145). The primary problem with such a textually confined methodology is that it ignores the most salient features of environmental texts: namely the particular environment informing the work.

In The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell notes, "[t]hese are the characteristic results of a metropolitan-based enterprise of academic criticism for which it easily becomes second nature to read literature about nature for its structural or ideological properties rather than for its experiential or referential aspects" (36). By engaging in field-based explorations of environmental texts and their extra-textual environments, we can more readily investigate the experiential and referential aspects of these texts. Such a process is key for understanding the work of nature writers who view ideology and structure to be either less significant than the characteristics of the environments they write about, or to grow organically from those environments.

Engaging in Interdisciplinary Field Studies

For scholars new to interdisciplinary, field-based ecocriticism, some guidance may be helpful in developing an approach to studying and teaching environmental texts in their extra-textual contexts. For a comprehensive bibliography of works in the field, I recommend the ASLE Bibliography, which can be searched online at http://www.asle.umn.edu/pubs/biblio/biblio.html. Similarly, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment is a biannual academic journal that many will find useful. Other key texts which will be helpful to newer scholars and instructors include Teaching in the Field: Working with Students in the Outdoor Classroom edited by Hal Crimmel, The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, Teaching Environmental Literature: Materials, Methods, Resources edited by Frederick Waage, Roderick Nash's Wilderness and the American Mind, and David Orr's Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. In addition to these resources, I have offered a few questions below as examples of the manner in which one might approach environmental texts through an interdisciplinary, field-based methodology.

Questions about the text: 1. How does my experience in this place (or with this activity) compare with the author's recorded experience, or how does it modify my interpretation of the text? 2. What can I discover about the author's methods and rhetorical choices by emulating them myself in my own writing? 3. How might the author's experience in this place have affected his or her writing process (choices, aims, methods, ideas, etc.), and the text itself (its images, metaphors, composition, revision, publication, information, etc.)?

Questions about the text and the place: 1. What correspondences do I see between the text and the place? 2. Is the author's representation of this place accurate in comparison with my own observations? 3. What values do we find in the text? What values accord with this place? Are they convergent or divergent? Why?

Questions about the place: 1. How has this place changed since the author wrote about it? 2. What other information can I gather about features of this place through direct observation or interdisciplinary research? 3. How has the text or author affected this place?

Questions about the audience: 1. How does the text affect my (or others') environmental values, attitudes, and actions? And, separately, how does the place affect my (or others') environmental values, attitudes, and actions? 2. How does my combined experience with both the text and the place affect my environmental values, attitudes and actions? 3. What are the differences between 1 and 2 above?

Depending on the scholar's aims, and the geographical, pedagogical, and financial constraints he or she is working under, there are three basic categories of ecocritical field studies: place-based, regional, and practice oriented.

Place-based Field Studies

The first field method takes place in situ, in the exact location about which the text being studied was written, I term this method "place-based field studies," since it focuses on the particular places emphasized in environmental texts. With this approach the scholar may explore the correspondences between the text and the place, or investigate the differences between literary representation and reality. Or the student may choose to compare the author's experience with his/her own experiences, how the place has changed, its effect on the text, or even the text's effect on the place. Such a process, for example, might incorporate field-based investigations of Walden Pond, its natural history and native species into the study of Thoreau's Walden. Similarly, one might choose to study parts of John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra by finding the exact locations described in the text.

I utilized just such an approach to Mary Austin's fiction with a group of students in the Owens Valley region of Southern California. We studied many of the species she describes in her work, came to understand the importance of water in her work and that region, and were astounded by the accuracy of her descriptions. In Lost Borders, for example, she notes, "where you find cattle dropped, skeleton or skin dried, the heads almost invariably will be turned toward the places where water-holes should be" (Western 43). Almost 100 years later, we were haunted by the accuracy of Austin's description as we stumbled upon a mummified cow carcass. Complete with a white grinning skull and sun-dried hide, the cow's remains appeared as if they had literally jumped off the pages of Austin's book. In order to test Austin's knowledge of the desert further, I took a bearing off the cow's exposed, skeletal nose, and began searching for the spring that she assured us must be there. A little over a mile later, we came upon a small, mud-bottomed spring, surrounded by willow and wild rose, just as she had promised.

Regional Field Studies

The second field approach does not require the student or scholar to travel to the exact location written about in a particular literary work, but rather to find a bioregion similar to the one represented in the text. I term this approach "regional field studies," because it emphasizes regional similarities between environmental texts and their extra-textual contexts.

For the ecocritic studying such writers as Mary Austin or Edward Abbey, for example, gaining some sort of experience in and ecosystems may be particularly edifying. Even if these field-based experiences do not take place in the exact location written about, much can be gained from studying similar and landscapes. One may still expect to find many of the same species and natural processes and much of the physical and aesthetic experience will remain the same whether one is in the Escalante Canyons, the Great Basin or Mojave Deserts, or reading Desert Solitaire or The Land of Little Rain. One need not travel to Arches National Park or the Owens Valley in order to benefit from such an interdisciplinary approach because many of the key issues in such texts and places will naturally overlap. Issues such as the availability of water; floral, faunal, and cultural adaptation to harsh environments; and common aesthetic attitudes towards desert climates will share significant similarities.

In a course focusing on Gary Snyder's work, for example, I took a group of students on a weeklong backpacking trip through the Northern Sierra, near where Snyder now lives, in a region where many of his poems are set, but in an area that does not specifically appear in his work. By studying the natural history of the region and its associated human history of mismanagement and abuse however, we were able to come to a much deeper understanding of Snyder's environmental ethics, and were able to interpret his poetry with great accuracy. We found that critics have often misinterpreted Snyder's poetry because they have lacked experiential knowledge of the particular species and issues about which he writes. In his discussion of "Manzanita," for example, Charles Molesworth claims that the lines "The longer you look / The bigger they seem," refer to the Manzanita bushes (151). During our field studies, however, we observed that the small berries of the Manzanita, usually smaller than a blueberry, do indeed, look like miniature apples as the plant's Spanish name describes. This observation brought us to recognize that the lines "The longer you look / The bigger they seem" do not, in fact, refer to the Manzanita bushes, but to the berries themselves.

Practice Oriented Field Studies

A third useful approach to uniting the study of environmental texts and natural environments entails emulating a particular author's methods. For this approach, it does not matter whether one's field experiences take place in a landscape that is very similar to, or quite different from, that treated by the author. The author's methods and practices, rather than the location, are of primary importance. I call this approach "practice oriented field studies" because it emphasizes the practices used by the author over the particular place in which the text was composed.

For example, an ecocritic might keep an almanac of his or her own backyard, or engage in some form of ecological restoration while studying a work like Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. By using Leopold's methods as a model for our own practice, we may learn more about how the text was produced, about the development of his ideas, and about our own home bioregion. Similarly, we might use the models for bioregional practice offered in Gary Snyder's prose and poetry to invigorate our own efforts, or those of our students, in environmental activism and reinhabitation. Engaging in such practices offers ecocritics and students rich opportunities for understanding the personal, political, and ecological contexts in which Snyder's work is written.

I developed this particular approach through teaching and studying John Muir's work with students throughout the Sierra Nevada region, as well as in Mexico. We emulated Muir's methods for keeping field journals, viewing the natural world from a variety of perspectives as Muir did himself, and studied his extant field journals and notebooks in order to better understand his compositional process. From such an investigation we concurred with Steven J. Holmes that works like My First Summer in the Sierra are much more fictionalized, and display a much greater degree of literary styling than most admit. However, we also discovered that with regard to the observed details, natural history information, and record of experiences, such works, although revised for narrative structure and rhetorical effect, are extremely reliable. In addition to learning about Muir's compositional process, the students became quite adept at journaling in the field, revising their notes, adding subsequent research, and crafting their work for publication. Through such a process, they were beginning to develop into nature writers themselves in addition to learning about one.

Interdisciplinary Field Studies: Four Key Elements

Regardless of which approach we choose to take, such interdisciplinary field-based investigations can be used to augment traditional scholarship and pedagogy, and offer a more complete understanding of environmental texts and their extra-textual environments. While the possibilities for engaging in such interdisciplinary field studies are virtually endless, they should include some combination of the following four key elements: one, the Natural Sciences to study particular places, species, and systems; two, the Environmental Humanities for the study of human culture and its interrelationship with the natural world; three, an increased depth of Self-Knowledge and critical examination of our own culturally received environmental beliefs and behaviors; and four, some form of Worldly Experience in the natural environments being studied.

In explaining this approach to students, I plot these principles as the four cardinal points on a compass, for to know who we are, we must first know where we are. There is nothing more fundamental than the ground beneath our feet, nothing more miraculous than its ability to sustain life, and nothing more necessary than our efforts to understand and defend it. I believe that interdisciplinary, field-based approaches to ecocritical scholarship and instruction will not only to teach us more about environmental texts and their extra-textual environments, but also promise to instill in us an ethic that values the natural world as much as the literary word.

Works Cited

Austin, Mary. Lost Borders. 1909. Western Trails: A Collection of Short Stories by Mary Austin. Ed. Melody Graulich. Reno: U of Nevada P, 1987. 39-99.

Branch, Michael P. and Rochelle Johnson, Daniel Patterson, and Scott Slovic, eds. Introduction. Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and the Environment. Moscow, ID: U of Idaho P, 1998.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995.

Marshall, Ian. Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1998.

Molesworth, Charles, ed. "The Political and Poetic Vision of Turtle Island." Critical Essays on Gary Snyder. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991.

Tallmadge, John. Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teacher's Path. Salt Lake: U of Utah P, 1997.

Corey Lewis. University of Nevada 

Lewis currently serves as Assistant Director of the University of Nevada, Reno's Core Writing Program where he teaches both traditional and field-based English classes.