Toward an Irreverent Ecocriticism

Abstract

I see an irreverent ecocriticism as being indebted to two major developments in and around the field: poststructuralist ecocriticism and queer ecology. Poststructuralist ecocriticism, as many readers no doubt know, can be traced to scholars such as William Cronon, Dana Phillips, and David Mazel. In his American Literary Environmentalism (2000), Mazel stresses that his work is not “about some myth of the environment, as if the environment were an ontologically stable, foundational identity we have a myth about. Rather, the environment is itself a myth, a ‘grand fable’ … a discursive construction, something whose ‘reality’ derives from the way we write, speak, and think about it” (xii). Similarly, the essays in Cronon’s 1996 collection Uncommon Ground take aim at simple, essentialist ideals of nature and wilderness; N. Katherine Hayles, for instance, argues that “the distinction between simulation and nature … is a crumbling dike, springing leaks everywhere we press upon it” (411). Some of this work may seem dated to those who engaged with poststructuralism much earlier. But, judging by the negative reactions of many ecocritics and environmentalists, it can also be viewed as quite the opposite: reactionary, overstated, heretical. Indeed, this work could be described as perverse for how it breaks with its forebears, which include not just “classic” ecocriticism but also first-wave or conservationist environmentalism.