Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia

Abstract

What has popularized and expanded the hermeneutic range of ecocriticism has in some ways also made ecocriticism seem immune to the challenges presented by so much of poststructuralism. Propelled and positioned within a context of environments increasingly degraded and dangerous, direct effects of our and our ancestors' behaviors, ecocriticism—seeking and espousing an immediacy and directness; an aesthetics of contact; and a firm disavowal of obscurantism, dizzying spinnings off, and general ineffectiveness—has found a wide and largely enthusiastic audience.1 The space of ecocriticism has indeed become one of considerable—though increasingly ambivalent—openness.2 Theorizing within this space—one that Peter Quigley has termed a “dangerous space”—has become a bit of a risky business, one that potentially threatens the peace of ecocritical communities. When Terry Gifford perceptively noted that “ecocriticism has been remarkably free of theoretical infighting” and that it is “perhaps the absence of a methodology”3 that is accountable for this phenomenon (15), he was probably correct, though there have been more voices of discontent than one would think, voices often ignored or given less airtime by an increasingly orthodox ecocritical machinery.4 The more we talk about representations of nature, the more it becomes clear that there is a need not only for permeable borders but also for more definitive structure, methodological definition, and viable terminology. The more we talk about representations of nature, the more it becomes clear that there is a need to talk about how contempt for the natural world is a definable and recognizable discourse (what we may call “ecophobia,” a term one blogger has perhaps prematurely called a “paradigm”).5 Though there has been a conflict developing among ecocritics, theorizing ecophobia should not deepen that conflict but may very well in fact lead to confluent theorizing and thus toward the kinds of methodological and structural definition some ecocritics seek.

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