H ANNES B ERGTHALLER Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both: A German Perspective on the Internationalization of a New Discipline I Globalizing (American) Ecocriticism Ecocriticism - simply put: the study of literature and culture from an ecologically informed perspective - has without question been one of the more remarkable success stories in the literature departments of U.S. universities over the past one and a half decades. 1 Since its emergence in the early 1990s, the number of ecocritical publications, of conferences held, and of panels sponsored have all been increasing at an astounding rate; so has the membership of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), which since its foundation in 1992 has served as the field’s institutional center of gravity. A steadily growing number of U.S. universities now offer graduate courses in ecocriticism, several English departments have specialized on it, and a number of university presses have made ecocritical work a cornerstone of their publishing activities. Apparently, the new discipline has struck a chord in academia and found a viable formula for authorizing itself - no small prize, indeed, in an environment where the humanities are under constant pressure to assert their relevance. So, with reference to Jean-François Lyotard’s remarks about the fate of knowledge after the end of the grands récits, one might start by asking: What are the “new moves” that ecocriticism has allowed its practitioners to make? How has it changed the “rules of the game” of literary criticism? How has it performed? 2 Ecocritical scholarship rarely displays the same kind of interpretive finesse, the knack for finding unexpected twists in already canonized texts or for drawing startling parallels across a range of heterogeneous materials which have done so much to establish deconstructivism and New Historicism. Yet it has introduced a set of ethical concerns, of heuristic assumptions and didactic methods that have just as much of a claim to newness - enough 1 I thank Katrin Amian, Michael Butter, and Christine Gerhardt for their many helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. 2 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 52. 274 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER even to justify talk of an “environmental turn” in literary studies. 3 To a considerable extent, ecocriticism’s success is owing to the high expectations it has set for itself. As a discipline, it has lofty goals: It understands itself as a response to the ecological crisis and aims at reorienting the study of literature and culture in such a way that it may play a role in the overcoming of that crisis. Thus ecocriticism has followed the example of other fields of literary study and answered the question of its legitimacy by deferring to the higher authority of a generally recognized political agenda - an agenda whose stock is bound to rise in the future, warranting confidence that the relevance of the field will grow accordingly. Lawrence Buell has expressed these hopes with a measure of low-key triumphalism that might be somewhat unsettling to scholars from adjacent fields (who may, after all, be ecocriticism’s competitors in the zero-sum game for institutional resources): “If, as W.E.B. Du Bois famously remarked, the key problem of the twentieth century has been the problem of the color line, it is not at all unlikely that the twenty-first century’s most pressing problem will be the sustainability of earth’s environment […].” 4 The presupposition is that the countless, globally dispersed phenomena of environmental degradation and rapid ecological change can and should be understood as symptoms of a single, planetary pathology. An essential corollary of this agenda is that ecocriticism must by definition be a global venture: Since the effluvia of tailpipes and smokestacks do not stop at the borders of nation states, neither can ecocriticism. In this respect, too, many representatives of the discipline are rather sanguine. Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic, for example, open their preface to the ISLE Reader, a collection of essays from the ASLE periodical re-published at the occasion of its tenth anniversary, with the following anecdote: The week we drafted this introduction, Scott received an e-mail out of the blue from the other side of the planet, from Brazil. At the time Scott was in Australia, familiarizing himself with the lively contemporary work of Australian environmental artists and scholars, when he received the message from a Brazilian student asking for assistance with an ecocritical graduate thesis on Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The same week Mike Branch sat in the Nevada desert and opened a letter from a Swedish graduate student asking for advice regarding ongoing scholarship on Henry Thoreau’s attitudes toward nineteenth-century technology. 5 The authors marshal this story as evidence that ecocriticism has fully justified the high hopes with which it was begun. Within little more than a 3 Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 1. This is, of course, as much indicative of institutional conditions in the humanities as it is of actual changes in the research agenda. The threshold beyond which a trend can be declared a ‘turn’ has been steadily lowered in the recent past. 4 Buell, “The Ecocritical Insurgency,” 699. 5 Branch and Slovic, ISLE Reader, xiii. ISLE is the quarterly journal of ASLE. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 275 decade, it has grown from the preoccupation of a handful of literary scholars in the U.S. into a global enterprise, and for old hands such as Slovic and Branch, intercontinental counseling activities have become part of their daily bread: “These are not unusual experiences for us, and for many of our colleagues - one week the message comes from Brazil or Sweden, the next week from Taiwan, Poland, Germany, or Estonia, from China, Turkey, Finland, or India.” 6 The steadily growing number of ASLE affiliates around the globe seems to lend additional weight to their confident appraisal. 7 Yet there are reasons to be skeptical whether ecocriticism has indeed managed to internationalise itself as successfully as Slovic and Branch would like their readers to believe. After all, Maria and Henrik - the two students from Brazil and Sweden who must shoulder the burden of representing the new, international generation of ecocritics - are working on canonical U.S. American authors, and it is more than likely that they do so within the institutional framework of an English or, possibly, an American Studies department. Nor is the title of the only book published outside the Anglophone world which Slovic and Branch cite in their brief overview of the history of the new discipline apt to dispel these doubts: “[T]he first collection of Japanese ecocriticism: Environmental Approaches to American Literature: Toward the World of Nature appeared […] in 1996.” 8 The problem which this anecdote thus inadvertently highlights is that outside the U.S., ecocriticism has been received not as the autonomous new interdiscipline as which it is frequently cast, but rather as a new branch within the study of Anglophone literature - in other words, as a subdiscipline of English and/ or American Studies. This is true not only in Asia, but in Europe as well, and particularly in Germany. 9 While there have been occasional attempts from within German studies departments at universities in Germany to approach their subject from an environmentalist angle, these efforts remained more or less insular and never congealed into a larger critical project 10 - and they 6 Ibid. 7 Branches of ASLE exist in the U.K., Japan, Korea, Australia/ New Zealand; separate but closely related organizations have recently been formed for Europe (the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment, EASCLE) in 2004 and for India (ASLE India and OSLE) in 2006. 8 Branch and Slovic, The ISLE Reader, xvi. 9 As it is the situation in Germany that I am most familiar with, the subsequent remarks will draw largely on my knowledge of the latter; however, exchanges with colleagues from various other European countries have satisfied me that much of the following applies to their respective countries, as well. 10 One may point out, e.g., Jürgen Haupt’s study of 20 th century German nature poetry (Natur und Lyrik, 1983), Gerhard Kaiser’s Mutter Natur und die Dampfmaschine (1991), or Jost Hermands (Im Wettlauf mit der Zeit, 1991) and Gernot Böhmes (Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik, 1989) forays towards an “ecological aesthetics.” 276 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER never entered into a sustained dialogue with similar work that was concurrently carried out in the U.S. As far as German studies is concerned, those who tried to latch on to the work that was carried out under the new conceptual umbrella were mostly scholars working outside of Germany and particularly in the U.K., where a vibrant ecocritical community had established itself during the 1990s (parallel to and to a large degree independently of developments in the U.S.). The small number of scholars in Germany who have consciously engaged with ecocriticsm are, with very few exceptions, Americanists. This may indeed strike one as a curiously twisted state of affairs: In a country where environmentalism has actually managed to move from protest movement to governing party (thoroughly normalizing itself in the process), a country that prides itself on its status as a beacon of progressive environmental politics, ecocriticism has mostly fallen on deaf ears; yet it has flourished in the country that many Europeans like to cast as the ecological archfiend, where environmentalism has been on the defensive since the 1980s. What does this tell us about ecocriticism and American Studies, both in Germany and the U.S.? In each of these cases, a somewhat different set of circumstances specific to the respective nation and discipline come into consideration. While a comprehensive assessment would therefore be a tall order, indeed, the situation provides fertile ground for speculation about its potential implications. It might be seen, for instance, as raising the question to what extent the steady downward spiral of green politics in the U.S. has fuelled the development of ecocriticism by sending disenchanted environmentalists to seek refuge at their word processors, thus compensating for the lack of tangible progress on matters of policy (and tacitly reformulating environmental engagement in terms of individual therapy). On the other hand, it may give occasion to remind ourselves that the roots of environmentalism reach deep into the mythological substrata of U.S. national identity, and that concern about ecological crises had entered public debate in the U.S. at least a decade before it registered with the citizenry of European countries. Not too long ago, in the 1960s and 70s, it was the U.S. who set the global standards for environmental policy; when the government of Willy Brandt added the term Umweltschutz to the portfolio of his minister for agriculture in 1969, the neologism was modelled on the English term ‘environmental protection,’ then already a familiar notion to most Americans. 11 On a different note, the asynchronous development of environmental criticism in Germany and the U.S. might prompt some to comment on the lamentable disconnect between the ivory towers of academia and the rest of society, or to contrast the ethos of political disengagement that prevails in 11 Blumenberg, Vollzähligkeit der Sterne, 439. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 277 the German humanities with the calls for reinstating the role of the public intellectual so often heard in the U.S. Finally, it might lead one to dismiss ecocriticism’s precarious state outside the U.S. as but the growing pains of what is, after all, still a very young field, and to congratulate American Studies for once again breaking new ground in the literature departments of European universities. Historically predisposed to an emancipatory politics and the pushing of disciplinary boundaries, less settled in its ways than the traditional philologies, American Studies have already served as a bridgehead for the study of popular culture, as well as for gender and ethnic studies. 12 It may be tempting to add ecocriticism to this list - and the fact that ecocritical work on British literature has received considerably less attention in Germany than that concerned with texts from the U.S. could be cited as a case in point. Such an optimistic appraisal of the situation would flatter German American Studies and bode well for ecocriticism’s future, effectively implying that it is only a matter of time before ecocriticism will be firmly established on this side of the Atlantic. However that may be, for the purposes of this paper, I shall focus on a different line of thought - one that, while being less charitable to both American Studies and ecocriticism, may shed some light on the reasons for the latter’s continuing marginality, as well as on the peculiar relationship the two disciplines have entertained with each other. II American Studies and its Discontents That ecocriticism should have arrived in Germany as a branch of American Studies is both rife with ironies and entirely appropriate. It is appropriate, first of all, because for the most part, the texts which U.S. ecocritics have dealt with fall into the purview of American Studies - even if most of them have been and still remain marginal to the Americanist canon (with few notable exceptions, such as Gary Snyder and, of course, Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau). Not coincidentally, ASLE began as a spin-off of the Western American Literature Association, and, despite considerable efforts to broaden the textual base, works by American writers and/ or about the American environment continue to account for the bulk of ecocritical work. 13 Secondly, ecocriticism in the form in which it emerged in the early 1990s was steeped in assumptions that are characteristically U.S. American - assumptions, e.g., about the redemptive potential and spiritual significance of nature (especially wild nature), about the superiority of rural forms 12 Sielke, “Theorizing American Studies,” 62f. 13 Cf. Armbruster and Wallace, Beyond Nature Writing, 1-8. 278 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER of life, and more generally about the availability of nature as a normative base for social arrangements. These assumptions aligned ecocriticism with the mythological underpinnings of earlier versions of American Studies - revolving, as they were, around the story of American Adam’s Errand into the Wilderness of the Virgin Land; 14 however, to the same extent that this “field imaginary” has increasingly come under critique from within American Studies, they have served to propel ecocriticism onto a trajectory of its own. This already brings us to the chief irony about the route by which ecocriticism arrived in Germany. It had begun as an “insurgency” 15 against the aloofness of literary criticism from the ethical imperatives of the ecological crisis, and specifically against the postmodernist doxa that had come to hold sway during the 1980s. As such, it shared an impulse with a number of contemporaneous attempts to infuse postmodernism with a sense of responsibility - an impulse, however, that in the case of U.S. ecocriticism was largely spent on a wholesale rejection of “theory.” Despite occasional gestures towards Levinas, there were few actual points of contact with the exponents of the “ethical turn” in literary studies. In fact, within American Studies, the arrival of the New Americanists - with their heavy theoretical machinery and their stated programme of extirpating any and all vestiges of American exceptionalism from their discipline - made the intellectual climate even less hospitable to many of the ideas future ecocritics held dear. The latter have tried to resolve this problem by carving out their own academic niche, so to speak - one with a more favourable micro-climate. U.S. ecocriticism thus acquired much of its present shape through a struggle to extricate itself from American Studies as they are currently practiced. The fissures along which this rift was eventually to form predated not only the emergence of ecocriticism, but the near-hegemony of postmodern approaches that precipitated the latter, as well; and these fissures ran largely along regional dividing lines. In the introduction to his most recent book, Glen Love, an early protagonist of the movement, recounts that it was the publication of Leo Marx’ Machine in the Garden in 1964 which first prompted him to seek a critical approach that would pay its proper dues to nature. He credits Marx for turning attention in the right direction, while taking exception at Marx’ dismissal of the pastoral as an exhausted literary form and his concomitant failure to see its potential as a conductor for ecological consciousness: 14 Pease, National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives, 3-6. For the affinities specifically between Lawrence Buell’s seminal The Environmental Imagination and R.W.B. Lewis’ The American Adam, cf. Giles, Virtual Americas, 12. 15 Buell, “The Ecocritical Insurgency.” Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 279 What was to escape his conclusions was a sense of the ecological complexity of nature, the impossibility of its complete control by human beings, and the obstinacy with which Americans would resist any dismissal into history and literary irony of what Marx had rightly called ‘the root conflict of our culture.’ 16 Marx was unable to view the desires for rural idyll and a life in harmony with nature, which were stirring mightily just as The Machine in the Garden was published, as anything other than wishful thinking or, worse, regressive fantasy. Love, on the other hand, understood Marx’ stance as yet another expression of a deeply ingrained bias which prevented the academic establishment from recognizing the relevance of texts which took nature and people’s relation to it as their primary subject, a bias as whose stronghold he identified the urbanized East Coast. He cites what has become a locus classicus for the high-handed anthropocentrism and humanistic hubris supposedly characteristic of urban intellectuals, a sentence out of a rejection letter Norman Mclean received from an Eastern publishing house for his short stories about life in western Montana: “These stories have trees in them.” 17 And this dismissive attitude is more than a matter of literary taste: According to Love and many other ecocritics, the unwillingness to take at face value texts which engage with nature directly and in a manner other than ironical reflects the great occidental malady, the alienation from nature that is both a cause and a product of our ecologically destructive social practices. The strong regionalist component in Love’s resentments becomes more conspicuous when his retrospective account is paired with the praise that another early protagonist of ecocriticism was showering on a writer then on his way to become the ‘poet laureate’ of the U.S. environmental movement - just as the latter was coming into its hegira and Love began casting for an ecological perspective on literary studies. In one of the first pieces of criticism on the poetry of Gary Snyder, published in 1968, Thomas Lyon predicted that it would be the turn to ecology through which the literature of the western U.S., following the lead of Snyder’s pioneering work, would finally achieve planetary significance (and the world-literary status so stubbornly denied by the Eastern establishment): “[T]he West’s great contribution to American culture,” he wrote, “will be in codifying and directing the natural drive towards ecological thought: a flowering of regional literature into literally worldwide attention and relevance.” 18 The West of which Lyon speaks here is, of course, not a merely geographical region - it is “but another word for the Wild,” as Henry D. Thoreau would have had it, and while the latter went on with the oracular claim that “in Wildness is the 16 Practical Ecocriticism, 2. 17 Qtd. in Love, Practical Ecocriticism, 13. 18 “The Ecological Vision of Gary Snyder,” 36. 280 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER preservation of the World,” 19 Lyon spelled out the utopian expectations now lodged in this mythological terrain: “The enormous expansion and deepening of the conservation movement, the new interest in the ecological sciences, and the wide search for cooperative, sacral, communal forms are all evidence that we seem to be trying to raise our sights to a holy vision of the world as a unity.” 20 Of course, it did not take very long until a lot of people gave up even seeming to try, and the high hopes for an imminent ecological revolution of consciousness were gradually buried. Yet some of the basic outlines of the ecocritical project were already visible through Lyon’s visionary sketch of a truly ecological literature: Ecocriticism would be the discipline whose task it was to foster and appraise the development of this literature, and to help it fulfil its proper (“cooperative, sacral, communal”) function. There is certainly more than one reason why it took another two decades before this project came to fruition and ecology began to be more widely acknowledged as an issue relevant to literary studies. A major factor was without doubt the already-mentioned rise of postmodernism in the broadest sense. Within the constructivist epistemologies that now came to dominance, nature figured not so much as a ‘holy unity’ than as a rhetorical strategy for obscuring the power relations that underpin social hierarchies. Historically, the normative force ascribed to the facts of nature had usually happened to side with those in power; it had served to stigmatise homosexuals and to legitimize the subjugation of women and people of colour. Now it seemed no longer enough to distinguish between socially conditioned symbolic overlays and a ‘natural’ substrate of material reality. It became the task of the critic to ‘deconstruct’ nature, to demystify and expose it, even in its materiality, as utterly contingent on society’s systems of signification. As the distinction between the natural and the cultural is itself a cultural artefact, nature was to be understood not as a reality somehow preceding its own discursive inscription, but as the product of differences marked within discourse - in short, a ‘social construction.’ As Judith Butler, one of the principal exponents of this view, put it: “‘Materiality’ designates a certain power effect or, rather, is power in its formative or constituting effects.” 21 Of course, the majority of critics commonly identified with this view were not concerned with environmental issues, at all. When they spoke of nature, they were referring first and foremost to human nature; with the notable exception of ecofeminists, who explicitly tried to extend their cri- 19 “Walking,” 609. 20 “The Ecological Vision of Gary Snyder,” 35. 21 Bodies that Matter, 34. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 281 tique of patriarchal logic to the domination of the natural environment, 22 the question of how humans’ ecological embeddedness might properly be conceptualised simply did not figure within postmodern theory. Yet this omission itself could be (and was) seen as symptomatic, and it is not difficult to understand why the postmodernist agenda alarmed many crititics with environmentalist convictions - and not only those who were, like Lyon, aiming at a full-fledged re-sacralization of nature. The assumption that the ‘material world’ as a whole is merely a projection of social categories onto what is, for all practical purposes, an empty void, not only foreclosed any chance for encounter with the otherness of the non-human world; it also dismantled the authority of the natural sciences on whose findings the realization that there is something like an ecological crisis crucially depends. As Ursula Heise points out, social constructionism appeared to be implacably at odds with a movement “whose primary pragmatic goal was to rescue a sense of the reality of environmental degradation from the obfuscations of political discourse.” 23 Most of ecocriticism’s earliest practitioners were thus convinced that postmodern theory, with its alleged moral relativism, high abstraction, and cosmopolitan glamour, was bent on vaporizing the very basis for any kind of effective resistance against the forces of environmental destruction. How was one to speak truth to power if truth itself was but a function of power? The animus which energized their efforts was aptly summarized by Gary Lease and Michael Soulé: “Certain contemporary forms of intellectual and social relativism can be just as destructive to nature as bulldozers and chain saws.” 24 It was this view of contemporary literary criticism that lent the punch to Cheryll Glotfelty’s admonition to future ecocritics, in her introduction to the first anthology of environmental criticism: “If we’re not part of the solution, we’re part of the problem.” 25 III Ecocriticism, Deep Ecology and Ecocentric Identity Politics What being a part of the solution precisely entailed for literary critics was, however, not much clearer in 1996 than it is now, a decade later. From the very start, ecocriticism has encompassed a bundle of heterogeneous projects that were united more by their professed political goals than by any shared methodological premises. The far ends of the spectrum were marked 22 See e.g. Merchant, The Death of Nature; Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature; Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy. 23 “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism,” 504. 24 Reinventing Nature? , xv-xvi. 25 “Literary Studies in an Age of Ecological Crisis,” xxi. 282 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER off by the unreconstructed poststructuralism of David Mazel’s readings of early U.S. literature, which relied strongly on theoretical tools on loan from gender and postcolonial studies, and by earnest attempts to ground literary studies in sociobiology or neo-Darwinism, such as those of Joseph Carroll or Glen E. Love. 26 However, to the majority of early ecocritics, by far the most important theoretical inspiration was Deep Ecology, a radical wing of environmentalism which took its name from the rejection of the “shallow” efforts at reform advocated by the movement’s mainstream. 27 Deep Ecology assumes as its basic premise that the root cause of environmental destruction is to be sought for not in the implementation of certain technologies, in a lack of prudence or predictive capability, or in the structural properties of modern society, but rather in the ‘othering’ of nature by the rationalist ideologies of occidental civilization. Unlike many non-Western and pre-modern cultures with their animistic beliefs in the subjecthood of non-human beings, Western modernity has posited a radical split between humans and nature, expelling the latter from the circle of moral consideration and effectively ‘silencing’ it. 28 The failure to recognize humanity’s actual oneness with nature, so the claim goes, allows the latter’s domination by the former to appear legitimate. The aim of the movement must therefore be to destroy the illusion of human separateness and to get people to acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature, i.e. the values which it possesses independently from those ascribed to it by human agents, merely by merit of what it is in and of itself. To use the vocabulary of Deep Ecology, the goal is to leave ‘anthropocentrism’ behind and work towards a ‘biocentric’ or ‘ecocentric’ vision, thus developing an ‘ecological self’ - a self that would thus be able to faithfully represent nature, both aesthetically and politically. Bill Devall, one of the movement’s foremost exponents in the U.S., has characterized the principle of ‘ecocentric identification’ underlying this process in the following way: “Humans are one of myriad self-realizing beings, and human maturity and self-realization come from broader and wider self-identification. Out of identification with forests, rivers, deserts, or mountains comes a kind of solidarity: ‘I am the rainforest’ or ‘I am speaking for this mountain because it is a part of me.’” 29 In what might strike some as an argumentative sleight of hand, Walter Benn Michaels has recently suggested that Deep Ecology ought to be looked 26 Mazel, American Literary Environmentalism; Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory; Love, Practical Ecocriticism. 27 The term “Deep Ecology” is a coinage of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, who until his death in 2004 was also a leading thinker of the movement; cf. Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.” 28 Cf. Manes, “Nature and Silence.” 29 “Deep Ecology and Radical Environmentalism,” 52. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 283 at as a mirror image of deconstruction: The proposition that the whole world can ‘speak’ to us (if only we would listen) is, Michaels claims, only another version - differently calibrated - of Derrida’s famous statement that there is no “outside of the text.” He identifies the shared “commitment to the materiality of the signifier (to the primacy of the mark) that makes the world into a text” as the theoretical base for the general shift from politics to ontology he sees as having occurred since the 1960s. 30 Their refusal to acknowledge that meaning is located on a different plane of analysis than that of physical causes and effects collapses the space in which arguments about values (both ethical and aesthetic) are possible, reducing the political options for both deconstruction and Deep Ecology to the defence of fixed identities and marking both as exponents of post-historicity. The question whether Michaels’s argument does justice to deconstruction as a philosophical exercise is beyond the scope of this paper; however, with respect to the cultural politics which deconstructionism and Deep Ecology were mustered to support, he is certainly correct. 31 It is remarkable how ecocriticism of the deep ecological stripe - while fashioning itself as an antidote to postmodern relativism and alienation from nature - has in fact reproduced the agenda of the various other revisionist movements which have swept through literary studies with the aim of transforming it from a purveyor of tradition into an engine of multicultural pluralisation. The programme advocated by many ecocritics amounts to what can be called ‘ecocentric identity politics.’ Nature is appended to the familiar list of socially marginalized groups, as in Lawrence Buell’s formulation: “[N]ature has been doubly otherized in modern thought. The natural environment as empirical reality has been made to subserve human interests, and one of these interests has been to 30 The Shape of the Signifier, 125. 31 In a sense, Michaels’s argument is less original than it may seem: Numerous ecocritics have tried to cure their discipline of its inbred aversion to theory by pointing out the affinities between Deep Ecology and deconstruction or other forms of poststructuralist theory; cf. Branch, “Ecocriticism”; Campbell, “The Land and Language of Desire”; Conley, “Ecopolitics”; Manes, “Nature and Silence.” Fittingly, these attempts tend to stress convergences in their respective political implications - most importantly, the breaking down of customary hierarchies; where they argue for conceptual parallels between the two, they are usually less than convincing. After all, Deep Ecology - like most forms of popular ecology - claims for itself a knowledge of nature that must take precedence over other ways of knowing it. Deep Ecology ‘decenters’ our ideas of nature only in order to consign humans to their properly peripheral place within it; this very act of redistributive justice presupposes a position from where the conflicting claims can be adjudicated (or, as often seems to be the case, the conflict itself adjourned). It is precisely the possibility of such a position that deconstructionism has put into question. For a more thorough discussion of this problem, cf. Bergthaller, Populäre Ökologie, 265ff. 284 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER make it serve as a symbolic reinforcement of the subservience of disempowered groups: nonwhites, women, and children.” 32 It is this conceptualisation of nature as an oppressed other that underlies Cheryl Glotfelty’s widely credited suggestion that ecocriticism follow the three-step model of feminist criticism as outlined by Elaine Showalter. In a first stage, ecocritics would be chiefly concerned with identifying and criticizing stereotypes (“Eden, Arcadia, virgin land, miasmal swamp, savage wilderness”) and with working through textual lacunae (“where is the natural world in this text? ”). 33 In the second stage, the principal task would be to recover, reassess and canonize a body of texts capable of representing the oppressed other, while the third stage would turn to the theoretical analysis of the epistemological and ontological fundamentals of the systems of domination, of their symbolical construction in literary discourse and language more generally. To what extent ecocriticism did indeed follow such a model of development is debatable. In any case, what figures in this schema as ‘second-stage’ work - i.e, the establishment of an ecocritical canon and a revision of the traditional hierarchy of genres - became the primary occupation for most ecocritics in the U.S. Keeping in mind Thomas Lyon’s claims for the Thoreauvian lineage, the literary domain which Glotfelty singled out as particularly promising for the purposes of canon formation cannot come as a surprise: [T]he hitherto neglected genre of nature writing, a tradition of nature-oriented nonfiction that originates in England with Gilbert White’s A Natural History of Selbourne (1789) and extends in America through Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, John Muir, Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and many others. 34 About the texts of this tradition it was assumed that they could play a similar role for ecocriticism as, say, nineteenth century slave narratives and domestic fiction have for African American studies and women studies, respectively: They would provide a genealogy for the ecocentric identity ecocritics were forging, and serve as models for the required transition “from representation of nature as a theater for human events to representation in the sense of advocacy of nature as a presence for its own sake.” 35 As the circumspection of Buell’s phrasing already indicates, it is precisely at this point that the analogy between ecocriticism and other forms of critical revisionism runs into serious trouble. The problem is not only 32 The Environmental Imagination, 21. 33 “Literary Studies in an Age of Ecological Crisis,” xxiii. 34 Ibid. 35 The Environmental Imagination, 52. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 285 the notorious fuzziness of the term ‘nature,’ a term that lumps together a multifarious array of entities whose respective ‘interests’ are less than obvious, but obviously less homogeneous than the use of the singular implies - thus begging the question where and on what level of ecological complexity the elusive subjecthood of nature is to be located. 36 Furthermore, there is obviously a categorical difference between women’s literature or African American literature on the one and ‘the literature of nature’ on the other hand. Of course, women and African Americans have had their advocates, too - but, as Michaels rightly points out, “once their rights were acknowledged, [they] could speak for themselves (indeed, their ability to speak for themselves is part of what made it plausible to think of them as having the relevant rights in the first place).” 37 As nature lacks not only the ability to speak for itself, but even the ability to approve or disapprove of its own legal representatives, the question of how to distinguish between genuine advocates of its otherness and mere ventriloquists - between those who have actually achieved an ecocentric sensibility and those who merely fake it - is even more crucial to the project of an ecocentric identity politics than it is to African American Studies or gender studies, and less likely to be settled. Eric Todd Smith has aptly summarized this problem, in a manner that makes clear that what is at stake in ecocentric identity politics is ultimately not the subjecthood of nature, but rather the identity of its self-proclaimed advocates: 36 And it bears mentioning that its replacement with terms such as ‘ecosystem,’ ‘the nonhuman world,’ ‘the natural environment,’ or ‘the biotic community’ is hardly a remedy for this problem. The incompatibility between a deep ecological “land ethic” as it was first outlined by Aldo Leopold and an ethics of animal rights is a case in point: If the supreme value is “the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” (Leopold, Sand County Almanach, 262), it is for example imperative to cull excess deer that threaten to obliterate a forest - an action which animal rights activists in their turn will have to condemn as murder. For a canonical discussion of this problem, see Callicott, “Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair,” and Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, 362ff. The notion that ‘nature’s interests’ could be identified and advocated thus rests on the idea that the entities of which it is composed are bound together in a stable, harmonious order in which their conflicts are sublated. For Leopold, the biotic ‘climax’ (as postulated by the ‘dynamic ecology’ of U.S. ecologist Frederic Clements and his followers) fulfilled this function. The idea has a venerable pedigree: it can be traced back to natural theology. Natural theology provided the conceptual basis from which both the tradition of nature writing and the science of ecology developed. Scientifically, this view of the natural environment has been thoroughly discredited - ecologists now see ecosystems as characterized by perpetual disequilibrium and prone to unpredictable, sometimes catastrophic fluctuations; see Botkin, Discordant Harmonies, 51ff. 37 The Shape of the Signifier, 119. 286 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER [W]hen the authority for assessing the ‘environmental crisis’ is centered in a pure, if silenced, subject - nature - with whom we must communicate, the discussion has simply been deflected toward a debate over which ‘proxy’ legitimately represents nature’s interests. […] In the end, the question of ‘what the land means’ carries only as much weight as the person arguing for it; conflicting accounts of what nature ‘means’ will persist and the ensuing arguments will necessarily be over who has perceived the authentic meaning. 38 Ecocritical attempts to resolve this dilemma have generally taken the form of a rehabilitation of realist aesthetics, in tandem with a certain theory of subject formation. They have entailed claims about literature’s capacity to furnish ‘adequate’ representations of and to refer the reader to the natural environment; claims about the phenomenology of human involvement in nature; and about the relationship between these. What unites almost all of these attempts is the premise that direct and unmediated (save by previous reading) physical immersion in nature is essential to the production of a properly ‘ecological consciousness.’ In order to actualise the capacity of a literary text to ‘put the reader in touch’ with the natural environment, it is necessary that not only the author seeks out the experience of the latter, but that her readers do so, as well. Many of ecocriticism’s innovations in the area of didactics are directly based on this idea. Having students, in addition to their reading, keep diaries devoted to environmental observation or write essays on their experience of nature; taking them for hikes to familiarize them with the natural environment in their home region or to visit the landscapes evoked in texts read in class, even teaching whole classes in the outdoors 39 - all of these practices are based on the assumption that only personal, physical experience of the natural environment can afford students the knowledge which would allow them to appreciate both the literature of nature and nature itself. Their goal is the education of students in what is often referred to as “ecological literacy,” 40 an intimate knowledge of and emotional attachment to a particular ecosystem or bioregion. 41 Environmental literacy might be seen as a litmus test for successful ecocentric identification; it is conceived as the chief goal and a necessary precondition for both nature writing and for ecocritical scholarship. Since its dissemination is the primary goal of both of these forms, there is no clear dividing line between them. Just as the work of an admired nature writer can be adduced as theoretical support for an ecocritical argument, so ecocritics can incorporate anecdotal material into their 38 “Dropping the Subject,” 34. 39 - as John Elder, one of ecocriticism’s pioneers, has been known to do; cf. Christensen, “The Voice of Experience,” 205. 40 Cf. Orr, Ecological Literacy. 41 For the links between ecocriticism and the bioregionalist movement, cf. Lindholt, “Literary Activism and the Bioregional Agenda.” Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 287 own work; the boundaries between academic and creative writing are deliberately blurred, as are those between the professional and the private lives of critics. As in the case of Lawrence Buell, their own life-stories may begin to echo those of their canonical authors and become a model for the process of transformation that each individual will have to embark on by itself: Thoreau’s career can be understood as a process of self-education in environmental reading, articulation, and bonding. […] To read [Walden] in light of antecedent drafts and journal material is to see Thoreau undergoing a partly planned, partly fortuitous, always somewhat conflicted odyssey of reorientation such as I myself have begun to undergo in recent years, such as it seems America has been undergoing, such as I am asking the reader to undergo by reconsidering the place of the environment in our conventions of reading and writing. 42 While Buell himself has largely refrained from giving his readers a more detailed account of his own ‘odyssey’, many other ecocritics have been less reticent in this respect. The fusion of personal narrative and literary criticism has become a hallmark of ecocriticism. Scott Slovic has coined the term “narrative criticism” for this genre; Michael Cohen has labelled it, much more pointedly, the “praise-song school.” 43 IV Provincializing (American) Ecocriticism In coming to the implications which this programme has for Americanists in Europe who are working within the field of ecocriticism, one might begin by stating that it puts them in something of a fix: If they were to take the agenda of ecocentric identity politics strictly by its word, they would have to cease being Americanists, and rather turn to the study of the literatures of the particular bioregion which they happen to call their home. Otherwise, they might end up in a position that from an ecocritical perspective would have to be denounced as unsustainable. 44 In the particular case of Germany, there are notorious precedents for the idea - so dear to most U.S. ecocritics - of revitalizing native forms of spirituality supposedly better able to nourish an intimate relation to the natural environment. While the historical affinity of green thought and Nazism in this country has too often afforded occasion for taking cheap shots at environmentalism in general, one may rightfully shudder at the idea what a German version of, say, Gary 42 The Environmental Imagination, 23. 43 Slovic, “Ecocriticism”; Cohen, “Blues in the Green.” 44 Which is to say, they may end up as I have ended up myself: knowing more about the environmental problems of the American West than about those in my home country, not to speak of those in my place of residence. 288 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER Snyder’s bioregionalist “ethnopoetics” could possibly look like. And even if we grant that reading Thoreau and hiking in the hills of a German Mittelgebirge may be combined in didactically profitable and even theoretically compelling ways, there are institutional hurdles to consider. The structure of English and American Studies departments in Germany rarely permits their faculty to specialize to the same extent as has become customary in the U.S. A teacher holding a chair for American Studies will be expected to be a generalist, and to cover much of the field in her seminars. Under such circumstances, the kind of continuous and deeply personal commitment required to make an ‘ecocentric’ approach even minimally plausible is difficult to make, to say the least. But perhaps the highest hurdle of all is that for cultural outsiders, the forms of ecocentric identification envisioned by ecocriticism of the Deep Ecological persuasion and exemplified by its canonical authors are too fraught with national myth to ever be fully convincing. This is most obviously the case with respect to the centrality accorded to wilderness, which ecocentric ecocritics tend to regard as the only space where nature can be experienced in its full otherness and phenomenological proximity. If such was indeed the case, ecocritics in Germany would have to concur with Aldo Leopold’s dire judgement on the state of nature in their country and save money for the next trip to the U.S. (or at least the old-growth forests of Białowiez˙ a). 45 Despite the efforts of Deep Ecology and its proponents within ecocriticism to extrapolate the specifically American cult of wilderness into an anthropological universal, most (if not all) forms of ecocentric identity essentially remain displaced forms of national (or regional) identity. How easy it is to reactivate the latent connection between wilderness worship and U.S. nationalism is forecefully illustrated by a statement Robert Redford issued to the members of the Natural Resources Defense Council in an open e-mail concerning the government’s plans for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; it could also stand as exemplary for the convictions professed by many ecocritics in the U.S., if only Redford had been a little less straightforward about the mythology which animates them - a candor obviously related to the date when the statement was issued, namely November 2001. Redford wrote: The preservation of irreplaceable wildlands like the Arctic Refuge and Greater Yellowstone is a core American value. I have never been more appreciative of the wisdom of that value than during these past few weeks. When we are filled with grief and unanswerable questions, it is often nature that we turn to for refuge and comfort. In the sanctuary of a forest or the vastness of the desert or the silence of a grassland, we can touch a timeless force larger than ourselves and our all- 45 “Deer and Dauerwald in Germany,” 460ff; Schama, Landscape and Memory, 37-74. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 289 too-human problems. This is where the healing begins. Those who would sell out this natural heritage - this spiritual heritage - would destroy a wellspring of American strength. 46 U.S. ecocritics will probably want to disclaim kinship with this ecologically updated version of American exceptionalism as it informs Redford’s statement, yet they generally subscribe to his transposition of ecology into the register of individual therapy. Even the more sophisticated varieties of eco-phenomenology that are put forward by some of them tend to present nature as a place of solitary contemplation where humans can take temporary leave from the habituated reflexivity of modern society and experience existential absolutes. 47 With the exalted position they accord to the individual’s consciousness and its redemption, these forms of ‘ecological spirituality,’ too, are deeply imbued with beliefs that spring not so much from the insights of scientific ecology as from U.S. civil religion; and again, there are reasons to be sceptical. It is not only that the vocabulary of ‘rootedness’ and ‘purity’ which this discourse is invested in has had disturbing political implications in the past 48 and is hardly adequate to tackle contemporary realities of displacement and hybridity. By putting the individual’s consciousness of and bodily immersion in the natural environment at the centre of their interest, ecocritics focus on what is, after all, only a tiny shred of the complex meshwork of eco-social relations - one that may have little relevance for an understanding of ecological crises, as Dana Phillipps has pointed out: “How aware one is of the environment, in the nature-writing sense of ‘aware’ […], is in the greater scheme of things simply not very important.” 49 The processes which the science of ecology describes and whose understanding is crucial for successful interventions into the relations between society and its natural environment take place almost completely outside the horizon of our natural sensorium. The spiritual bonding to the land that some establish by walking or farming it, however deeply felt, will never be a satisfactory replacement for satellite images and computer models; in fact, it may even turn out to be a distraction from the kinds of global transaction on which the fate of individual locales now hinges. It is in this context that Ulrich Beck’s dictum that our age is characterized by an “expropriation of the senses” needs to be understood. 50 And while one may grant that the ‘anaesthetizing’ effects of the new digital media do represent 46 “Letter from Robert Redford about ANWR.” 47 E.g., Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous; Westling, “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World.” 48 For an exemplary treatment of this matter, cf. Solnit, As Eve Said to the Serpent, 123-32. 49 The Truth of Ecology, 203. 50 World Risk Society, 55. 290 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER an obstacle to the remediation of environmental problems - after all, they make it much more easy for people to shut out an increasingly unpleasant world from their personal lives - it must not be forgotten that the concept of a ‘global environmental crisis’ is itself utterly dependent on the existence of these very same technologies. Considering all of the above, it is scarcely surprising that ecocriticism was received so reluctantly outside of the U.S., and it will also be apparent that the ecocentric identity politics of early U.S. ecocriticism are hardly an agenda that European Americanists should want to emulate, if so they could. At the same time, it will have become evident why ecocriticism stands to benefit from a rapprochement with American Studies - a rapprochement in which German scholars with in interest in ecocriticism have perforce been engaged in from the very start, partly because the limits of those models of ecocriticism described in the foregoing are, it seems, more obvious to cultural outsiders, partly because of the different disciplinary traditions and institutional settings within which they operate: Postmodern theory never dominated English departments in Germany to the same extent that it did in the U.S., and consequently did not generate the kind of resentment which drove much early ecocriticism - indeed, as mentioned above, the openness to new theoretical developments has been an important aspect of the self-image which German American Studies cultivated vis-àvis the traditionalism characterizing much of English philology, making the anti-theoretical animus even less appealing. Furthermore, their institutional affiliation required German practitioners of ecocriticism to integrate the field into an explicitly Americanist curriculum. A rapprochement between American Studies and ecocriticism entails not only a critique of the various forms in which the discourse of U.S. environmentalism has reproduced a politically debilitating national mythology, but also an exploration of how environmentalist concerns relate to the issues which have driven much Americanist scholarship of the recent past, i.e., first and foremost questions of race and gender. At least in the case of Germany, this has indeed been the preoccupation of Americanist ecocritics (or ecocritical Americanists): the focus here has frequently been on the intersections of ecocriticism with African American and gender studies, and more broadly on questions of environmental justice; the topoi of the American wilderness mystique were revisited less in a celebratory than in a coolly analytical (even if not entirely unsympathetic) fashion. 51 As pointed out above, one of the 51 To cite only a few examples: Gerhardt, “The Greening of African American Literary Landscapes”; Mayer (ed.), Restoring the Connection to the Natural World; Grewe- Volpp, “The oil was made from their bones”; Schäfer, Mary Austin’s Regionalism; Gersdorf, “Ecocritical Uses of the Erotic.” Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 291 weaknesses of U.S. ecocriticism has been that the critical vocabulary with which it approaches its subject matter is frequently borrowed from the very same tradition which it sets out to study. Thus one of the most important assets that scholars with a grounding outside the U.S. (or, more broadly, the Anglophone world) can bring to the necessary dialogue between ecocriticism and American Studies is their access to an archive of texts that may offer a markedly different perspective on environmental issues, as some of the most interesting studies by German ecocritics go to show - one may point, e.g., to Thomas Claviez’s assessment of the environmentalist potential of American pragmatism from the perspective of Adorno’s critical theory, to Sylvia Mayer’s study of New England regionalist literature, which made extensive use of the typology of environmental ethics put forward by Angelika Krebs, or to the work of Ursula Heise, whose appropriation of Ulrich Beck’s theory of the risk society had a noticeable impact on the direction which ecocriticism has taken over the past few years. 52 In their refusal to measure American environmentalism by its own standards, all of these studies have contributed to its “provincialization,” as Rob Nixon has described the readjustment of perspective that will be required if ecocriticism is to overcome its “superpower parochialism” and develop into a truly transnational project. 53 V Greening American Studies Of course, an awareness of the limitations of U.S. ecocriticism is hardly a prerogative of ecocritics from outside the U.S. - as pointed out above, ecocriticism has always been marked by a large diversity of approaches, and with the rapid expansion of the field, many of the assumptions described in the foregoing have come under rigorous critique. Largely in response to these interventions, the last few years have already seen a pronounced shift towards issues of environmental justice and urban ecology. Lawrence Buell, a figurehead of the movement from its very inception who followed all of these developments very closely, has recently described them as nothing less than a “second-wave [of] environmental criticism.” 54 The fact that he choses the term “environmental criticism,” rather than ecocriticism, in order to identify his own work is in itself highly significant, gesturing as it is towards 52 Claviez, “Pragmatism, Critical Theory, and the Search for Ecological Genalogies in American Culture”; Mayer, Naturethik und Neuengland-Regionalliteratur; Heise, “Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems”; Ursula Heise is, it should be added, of German extraction, but neither an Americanist nor based in Germany. 53 “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 247. 54 The Future of Environmental Criticism, 8. 292 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER an acknowledgement of the limitations of some of the views that have become firmly associated with (first-wave) ecocriticism, and thus towards a broadening of perspectives. And if Buell’s new nomenclature recycles the analogy between ecocriticism and feminism already familiar from Cheryl Glotfelty’s programmatic statement of a decade ago, it may have a somewhat different valence today, as it coincides with changes in the environmentalist agenda that are, to quote Rob Nixon again, “similar to the mutation of feminism, which was often dismissed, twenty or thirty years ago, as white, privileged, and irrelevant to the needs of third world women.” 55 To put this point differently: It is finally becoming obvious that questions of ecology cannot be detached from questions of social justice. What this also means is that most, if not all of the emancipatory projects under whose flags American Studies sail today are intricately bound up with issues that have so far been relegated to the ecocritical domain, issues which they cannot bracket any longer without etiolating the political relevance of their work. When Janice Radway, in her 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association, praised Americanist work that focussed on “intricate interdependencies,” she was referring only to “attempts to rethink nationalism, race, culture, ethnicity, identity, sex, and gender.” 56 Her call to untether the “analysis of community and identity formation” from “geography” and “national borders” is as apposite as ever, and particularly so for ecocriticism; yet she did not mention, even with a single word, the ecological interdependencies which will continue to shape the “cultural flows” that are her primary concern. 57 If American Studies has a crucial role to play in highlighting the limitations of ecocriticism, the converse is equally true. Aldo Leopold’s plea in his seminal essay “The Land Ethic” ought to be mandatory reading for Americanists. After so much time has been spent thinking about the cultural characteristics of the various colonizing nations, Leopold wrote in 1949, it is time now to ponder the fact that the cane-lands [of Kentucky], when subjected to the particular mixture of forces represented by the cow, plow, fire, and axe of the pioneer, became bluegrass. What if the plant succession inherent in this dark and bloody ground had, under the impact of these forces, given us some worthless sedge, shrub, or weed? Would Boone and Kenton have held out? Would there have been any overflow into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri? Any Louisiana Purchase? Any transcontinental union of new states? Any Civil War? 58 55 “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 243. 56 “What’s in a Name? ,” 53. 57 Ibid., 64. 58 A Sand County Almanach, 241. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 293 Lest some readers wrinkle their nose at the faint odour of nativism, one may add to this statement a scientific fact which Leopold could not have been aware of, but that only adds to the trenchancy his observations have for the transnational aspirations of American Studies: Kentucky bluegrass was not, as he believed, “inherent” in the region’s plant succession - it had been introduced by European colonists. 59 The central point here is that political and ecological conquest have usually gone hand in hand, as the many scholars in environmental history and the environmental justice movement who followed Leopold’s injunction have shown. 60 In an age of accelerating globalization, this linkage seems not only to hold faster then ever - its implications are becoming more wide-reaching, as well. The wholesale destruction which many of the poorest countries wreak on their ecosystems in order to satisfy the more affluent countries’ appetite for meat; the export of ecological risks to countries so desperate for short-term economic development that they cannot afford to enforce environmental regulations; the amount of violence inflicted around the world in order to safeguard the global economy’s supply of fossil fuels 61 - these are only some of the most blatant cases that go to show why approaches which purport to situate texts in the material history of a culture but fail to take into account the relation between this culture and the natural environment have to be considered as deficient. So it seems that a mutual learning process is in order. American Studies will have to acknowledge that there is an ecological dimension to the circulation of “ideas, people, culture, and capital” 62 which they take as their primary subject matter, and that this dimension imposes limitations on cultural processes. Like the boundaries of the nation state, ecological limits can be deconstructed, but this will not stop them from having material effects. In order to properly conceptualise the latter, American Studies will have to follow the example of ecocriticism in accepting, though not without certain reservations, the authority of the natural sciences and the necessity of procedures for establishing legitimate constraints on human interaction with 59 Stewart and Hebda, “Grasses of the Columbia Basin of British Columbia.” 60 The classic text being, of course, Alfred W. Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972). A closer look at the development of the discipline of environmental history would reveal another ironic counterpoint to the problematic relationship between ecocriticism and American Studies: During the 1960s and 70s, ignored by mainstream historians, environmental history found shelter in the fold of American Studies; with the ascendance of the race, gender, class paradigm, it was gradually pushed out - synchronously to the emergence of ecocriticism - but has since become a mainstay of the historical profession. Cf. Hal Rothman, “Conceptualizing the Real.” 61 For a useful overview of the literature on the nexus between imperialism and environmental politics, cf. Simon Dalby, “Ecological Politics, Violence, and the Theme of Empire.” 62 Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads of Cultures,” 21. 294 H ANNES B ERGTHALLER the natural environment. Ecocrititicism, for its part, will have to recognize that ecological limits are not simply material givens. Especially as they take on the shape of environmental risks, they depend on fictitious anticipations of possible futures; they are, as Beck writes, “neither purely factual claims nor exclusively value claims. Instead, they are either both at the same time or something in between, a ‘mathematicized morality’ […].” 63 Ecological limits, it must be concluded, can never be completely disentangled from the rhetorical strategies used in order to bring home (or, as it were, dissimulate) the consequences of their violation; nor can they be well understood in the complete absence of expertise from the natural sciences. Such conceptual hybrids pose a significant challenge to literary studies, and meeting this challenge will require further disciplinary cross-pollination, both within and beyond the limits of what used to be the humanities. Ecocriticism’s failure to demarcate for itself a distinct disciplinary territory, the fact that it has had to make do at the margins of established fields and has frequently blended into them, must therefore not be seen only as a sign of weakness - it might just be the price that has to be paid for experimenting with such new approaches and new theoretical vocabularies as will be necessary in order to come to terms with a subject matter so unwieldy and so pressing as the relation between society and ecology. If this be so, then it is time that American Studies foot their part of the bill. 63 “Risk Society Revisited,” 215. Ecocriticism, American Studies, and the Limits of Both 295 Works Cited Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Armbruster, Karla and Kathleen Wallace (Eds.). Beyond Nature Writing. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2001. Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. 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