Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication

Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Vidya Sarveswaran, Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Vidya Sarveswaran

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351682695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Ecocriticism and environmental communication studies have for many years co-existed as parallel disciplines, occasionally crossing paths but typically operating in separate academic spheres. These fields are now rapidly converging, and this handbook aims to reinforce the common concerns and methodologies of the sibling disciplines.

The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication charts the history of the relationship between ecocriticism and environmental communication studies, while also highlighting key new paradigms in information studies, diverse examples of practical applications of environmental communication and textual analysis, and the patterns and challenges of environmental communication in non-Western societies. Contributors to this book include literary, film and religious studies scholars, communication studies specialists, environmental historians, practicing journalists, art critics, linguists, ethnographers, sociologists, literary theorists, and others, but all focus their discussions on key issues in textual representations of human–nature relationships and on the challenges and possibilities of environmental communication. The handbook is designed to map existing trends in both ecocriticism and environmental communication and to predict future directions.

This handbook will be an essential reference for teachers, students, and practitioners of environmental literature, film, journalism, communication, and rhetoric, and well as the broader meta-discipline of environmental humanities.

PART I

New frameworks

1

ECOCRITICISM AND DISCOURSE

Andrew McMurry

The human discourse show

Not long ago I attended a mock teaching lecture by a job applicant for a position that had opened up in our department. The interviewee passed out a text we were to analyze in our roles as first-year students: a poem by the black Scottish poet Jackie Kay called “In My Country.” This short poem describes a walk by (we surmise) the poet herself, along what we imagine is a Scottish shoreline where an “honest” river “shakes hands with the sea” (24). She encounters another woman who challenges her right to be there—to be anywhere, really, in this historically white nation—with the provocative question, “Where do you come from?” The poet replies without hesitation, without apology, and without qualification: “Here. These parts.”

We broke into small groups to brainstorm the poem’s images, tropes, and characters. When we reconvened as a class, the interviewee did a brilliant job of bringing to bear our work and the work of the poem on larger questions of identity, belonging, nationhood, and so forth. The discussion really took off.

For some reason during the course of this job season I had emerged as the committee’s designated bad cop. So I dutifully donned the hat of a mutinous freshman, and I asserted the poem was mostly about elemental things: air, land, water, and, particularly, rivers and oceans. Only incidentally were the movements and doings of people of any significance. What appeared to be the focal human interaction of the poem, I argued, was just some minor business carried out in the interstices of an estuarine landscape; any other sort of back and forth between random people would have equally served to highlight their irrelevance in the context of the grand, timeless flow of the river in its meeting with the sea. Long after these temporally-limited, self-important individuals moved off, I claimed, that honest river would roll on—no matter what any of us in this room thought, because we, too, were mostly beside the point.

Well, everyone laughed, and nobody was buying it. Neither was I. Reading literature requires the exercise of prudence and good faith: the rejection of wrong-track interpretation and the affirmation of right-track interpretation. You have to play the game of explication and meaning-making; you have to stay within the well-marked guardrails of acceptable thought. Metaphors fly to their targets; narratives stay on their paths; themes trumpet their arrival. There’s a compact between the reader and the author—the latter a complex intentional function we like to imagine stands behind the text—that consists of something like, “You pretend to be speaking to me and I’ll pretend to be understanding you. We’ll meet in a place where we can both be comfortable.” Sure, there are lots of ways to skin a cat, and lots of ways to dissect a poem, but some techniques produce a truer, or maybe stronger (as Harold Bloom would say), reading than others, one that jibes with what we take to be a fitting convergence of word, world, and audience. Mine was weak, notional, unsupportable. It was misanthropic. If I ignored the represented humans, ditched the human interest angle, and, maybe worst of all, made light of my own authority as the human reader of this human artifact, well, I was not just not playing the hermeneutical game, I was flipping over the table.

My infelicitous reading does bring me, however, to the point I want to make in introducing this chapter on ecocriticism and discourse: humans are the A-listers in the human discourse show, and ecocritics have to work like hell to bring the bit players—i.e., the non-human world—downstage. Thoreau wrote, “I wish to speak a word for Nature,” in part because no matter what the poet says nature can never speak for itself (243).

Discourses: big and small

In literary studies we often use the word “Discourse” to signal big, amorphous thought-movements and period-tied grand narratives like “The Discourse of Madness” or the “Discourse of Modernity.” I’ll stipulate to the fact that what I’m going to discuss here operates in the margins of, let’s call it, the “Discourse of Anthropocentrism.” But in this chapter I want to move away from a detailed analysis of that metanarrative (stipulating to its existence as a kind of massively powerful conditioning force in minds, matter, and ecosocial life) and to less ambitiously consider micro-level “discourses” (note the small “d”) that are more akin to “parole” than to “langue,” to borrow Saussure’s terminology. A micro-level discourse could be, for example, any sort of everyday text, its linguistic apparatus, and its contexts of production and reception. (Because every text that you can think of is always already part of a collection of similar texts, unintelligible in isolation but rarely if ever isolable, I take no risk in making this fairly reductive definition.) Humbly, I want to offer a few concepts that help us understand how the micro and the macro levels are bridged through lexicogrammar, that is, word choices and their sequencing.

In doing so, I’m informed by Halliday’s systemic functional theory and social semiotics; the venerable rhetorical canon of elecutio and its contemporary cousin, stylistics; twentieth-century language disciplines like sociolinguistics and pragmatics; environmental communication and ecolinguistics; and conversation analysis and speech act theory. Most especially, I’m guided by critical discourse analysis (CDA), an approach that brings together much of what is tactically useful from all the foregoing and to which is added a dash of left political theory and critique. Along these lines, then, “discourse studies” of the flavor I want to present has been developed to give us insights into how ideology is inscribed in the linguistic nuts and bolts of texts.

More precisely, for analysis of texts that operate within the Discourse of Anthropocentrism (which includes, arguably, all texts!), I will assume the following:

• that discourses are representations of and interventions in ecosocial reality produced and reproduced in texts and by participants (both text creators and text consumers);
• that although texts appear to be the products of individual participants, they are overdetermined by existent, persistent, insistent ideological dispositions embedded in the ecosocial order;
• that linguistic choices in texts and ideological dispositions are mutually constitutive and reinforcing;
• that sentence-level grammatical and lexical choices are not ideologically neutral;
• that such choices can express ecosocial exigencies and purposes.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) and literature

For ecocritics, predominantly but not exclusively concerned with ecocentric literary texts and other creative cultural productions with eco/enviro inflections, the value of CDA will not be immediately apparent. Poems, stories, essays, and films present special challenges for CDA; such artifacts interrupt the predictable patterns of quotidian speech and writing where linkages between overt themes and supporting linguistic structures are relatively straightforward (e.g., When President Trump says “There was no collusion,” the denial of his agency with respect to the actual matter is buttressed by his choice of the passive voice at the sentence level). Aristotle made a distinction 2500 years ago between rhetoric and poetics, and the distinction remains non-trivial. Rhetoric (and by extension CDA) prioritizes suasive language: the words and texts of rhetors as they represent reality with a view to changing beliefs, attitudes, and actions in audiences. Poetics looks at language one step further removed, in the sense that suasory motives and elements are trickier to pin down. Unlike “working” genres of communication, genres like poetry, drama, belles lettres, fiction—what we lump together under the moniker “literature”—are artfully designed to veer away from (or defamiliarize as Bakhtin put it) everyday speech and writing. Literary criticism thus gravitates toward considerations of play, openness, expressiveness, ambiguity, etc., considerations often absent from critical discourse analysis, which seeks to tackle matters of pragmatics, persuasion, and politics. In discourse analysis, sometimes the most mundane pieces of language prove the most interesting; in literary criticism that is rarely true.

Harry Widdowson says:

what is distinctive about a poem, for example, is the language is organized into a pattern of recurring sounds, structures and meanings which are not determined by the phonology, syntax or semantics of the language code which provides it with its basic resources.

(39)

In other words, while literary language must draw on the same set of resources as everyday speech and writing, it extends those resources. Yet for this very reason—that literary texts are at bottom forged from the same lexicogrammatical possibilities accessible to all texts—discourse analytical tools can be applied to them fruitfully.

One quantifiable measure of the crucial difference between the literary and non-literary is to observe that the literary text generally possesses a lexical diversity (number of different words in a text) and a lexical density (the ratio of content words to connecting words) very much higher than, say, a conversation, a technical report, or a news article. Decoding a lexically dense and diverse literary text is a specialized activity that assumes the semantic freight of the literary text is weightier than what the words themselves technically bear. A poem just doesn’t want to map onto the world as straightforwardly as, say, a press release from the EPA, and we don’t go into the exercise of interpreting the poem by assuming otherwise. Its lexical and grammatical divagations put it at great remove from the normal language–thought matrix that contributes to genres produced in politics, business, education, advertising, and so on—the sorts of genres where CDA is typically applied.

The enforcement of a separation between literary theory (and literary criticism) and discourse theory is thus conceptually, perhaps aesthetically, justifiable. We shouldn’t forget, however, that policing always occurs for historical, cultural, and political reasons. True, the generic borders between poems and political speeches are robust. But they are not inviolable. Borders exist not simply to foster inclusion but to exclude the other. Just as a chimp shares 99 percent of its DNA with Homo sapiens, there’s actually a lot of linguistic overlap between novels and news reports. Yes, the differences that make a difference, well, you could say they make all the difference. Yet the common grammars and lexicons—the linguistic affordances and constraints; the provenance of signs, symbols, and metaphors; the cultural touchstones and commonplaces; the interdiscursive baggage—all of these are hugely significant. And the undergirding rhetorical purposes of literary texts, while often vague or hidden, are not absent. In fact, they are often very clear. Roger Fowler, thinking of Orwell’s seminal critique of hegemonic discourse in “Politics and the English Language,” writes, “all language, not just political uses, constantly drifts towards the affirmation of fixed, and usually prejudicial, categories. Criticism, and literature itself, have roles in combating this tendency” (48). Thus, many of the same tools derived from analysis of everyday discourse can, with some tinkering, enhance our insights into the texts ecocritics tend to study—texts that we believe may lend their voices to the resistance against anthropocentrism and to the preservation of nature (or, for that matter, to nature’s degradation or its destruction).

To sum up: the claim I’m making here is apposite to the one that Greg Garrard identified in his landmark text, Ecocriticism: “the study of rhetoric supplies us with a model of a cultural reading practice tied to moral and political concerns, and one which is alert to both the real or literal and figural or constructed interpretations of ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’” (16). The same is true, I argue, for critical discourse analysis, which I like to think of as a souped-up, linguistically attuned version of rhetorical analysis. In other words, though literary texts tend to be more complex and ambiguous than political speeches or advertisements, we can (and often do) read them as if they are making claims on our hearts and minds. Literary texts are symbolic interventions into our beliefs, actions, and attitudes by authors (or author functions, if you prefer) who exist in networks of affiliation with other people, places, events, and discourses. In their own way, literary and other creative texts do the same things that all communications do: insert themselves into the world in an effort to change it.

Textual modes of ecological engagement

The meaning potential of any given swath of discourse will be impoverished if its audience lacks sufficient contextual knowledge. Sometimes the lack is a result not of ignorance but of trained incapacity. While mainstream literary critics tend to pass over without comment the ecological/environmental contexts of texts, ecocritics have become pretty good at articulating them. At the risk of framing the problematic too simply, we can divide the ecosocial entanglements of literary texts into four broad modes:

• the ecophobic—texts that are uninterested in the non-human world, feature it as incidental, or reject it altogether (e.g., The Portrait of a Lady);
• the ecophatic—texts that draw on the non-human to affirm, model, and metaphorize human social experience and self-understanding (e.g., Emerson’s Nature);
• the ecoliterate—texts that comprehensively register and reflect upon the interplay of the human and non-human (e.g., The Overstory);
• the ecophilic—texts that passionately speak about/for/with the non-human (e.g., “Walking”).

I want to be clear that I don’t intend these modes as decisive: any author—any person—can range throughout these modes in the course of a text or in the course of a day. They have only heuristical value (and I hesitate to even include the ecophilic, which is probably just a hypertrophied instance of the ecoliterate—or, sometimes, the ecophatic, e.g., The Call of the Wild). But they may be useful for laying out tendencies, penchants, leanings, allegiances; perhaps most importantly, in the porous boundary between the ecophatic and the ecoliterate, we locate the issue that so many authors (and ecocritics) are trying to sort out: the consequential difference between viewing the world as for us and not for us. Alice Walker powerfully framed the matter (in an eponymous essay) as follows: “everything is a human being.” Everything is a human being if we measure it all through our own eyes (and language) and come to the conclusion the universe exists to realize us; yet at the same time, everything is a human being if we yearn to inscribe in the world the same agency/subjectivity that we’ve come to grant ourselves. And if we are able to do that, however precariously and provisionally, we may also find that neither the universe nor we ourselves are human beings at all—if by human we mean an entity meant to be lord of everything.

Now, I could argue, as I did with the Kay poem, that there will always be some measure of environmental (un)consciousness in any ecophatic text that manages to cough up an occasional reference to a bird or a tree. I coul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword – M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer
• Introduction
• PART I: New frameworks
• PART II: Pragmatic communication
• PART III: Non-Western environmental communication
• Afterword – Homero Aridjis and Betty Ferber
• Index