My topic is not what it was in April or May. My topic has transformed and has begun to grow a new bibliography to support its new direction.
The new additions to my new bibliography range from the psychological experience of reading fiction and receiving stories to theories of how literature is related to environmental aspects of context to the possibilities for science fiction to contribute to this conversation to insights from writers themselves about all of the above. Even as I begin, I realize I am straddling several fields that I didn’t know were so separate.
There were two readings in particular that did seem aware of the multifaceted overlaps between the social science perspectives on narrative functions and the realm of the humanities. In Suzanne Keen’s “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” she brings her experience as an English professor in conversation with the psychological and scientific inquiries related to communication and information. She seeks to define empathy as a shared emotional reaction to another being, fictional or real. She seeks to explain the variations in how people experience empathy in a novel and delves into situations that enhance or impede narrative empathy.
The other reading that seemed to be a bridge between the social sciences and humanities was the edited volume What’s Nature Worth? Narrative Expressions of Environmental Values by Terre Satterfield and Scott Slovic. In the introduction, the authors explored different ways of valuing the environment which spoke directly of political and economic methods of evaluation. The goal of the book is to explore how narrative, specifically nature writing (largely non-fictional) may communicate values and guide policy differently, deeper, and perhaps better than information modes of communicating. Their method was to interview nature writers about their intended environmental values and the importance of their work.
While Keen looks towards the social science from her humanities background, Satterfield and Slovic seek answers from artists to speak to their social science goals. These perspectives are something that I need to pay attention to.
The “Place” of Stories
“Place-based” is a buzzword in the current landscape of environmental studies, implying that everything from education to policy to writing should be rooted in a specific place. In my reading, I came across Green and Brock’s many essays on transportation, enjoyment, and narrative and Busselle and Bilandzic’s contributions to the field . Their research revolves around the notion that stories engage people (readers, viewers, receivers) by way of transportation. This is defined by the reader feeling lost in the story, perhaps losing track of time or other aspects of where they are and instead being swept into the experience created by the story. In many ways, this is similar to physical travel, but it occurs largely in the imagination. Green & Brock’s work seeks to understand the factors that lead to greater or lesser degrees of transportation. Importantly, the fictional aspect of the story, no matter how realistic or unrealistic the invented narrative may be, does not detract from the ability to be transported. The authors compare transportation with a flow state of being entirely absorbed in an activity. With narrative, the activity is creating mental models of meaning (Busselle and Bialandzic 2008). I found their rejection of the term “suspension of disbelief” in favor of the notion of a reader creating belief illuminating. In Satterfield and Slovic’s introduction, they quote Terry Tempest Williams discussing how storytelling is setting up a trance (Satterfield and Slovic 2005, p.13). In my Intro to Fiction class as well, this idea of being transported psychologically into a made up world is widespread among author’s experiences of writing.
In this ways, stories create worlds, do they not? Whereas would readers/viewers travel if not to a world alike or unlike our own when they are transported (or transport themselves)? This idea of world-building is familiar in science fiction and fantasy, where writers create world very different from our own and still maintain the ability to transport readers. Readings from Noel Gough and Ursula Le Guin speak to science fiction in this capacity, and connect the specific talents of science fiction to the field of ecocriticism and environmental writing (Gough 1998).
These readings all spur a budding notion of stories not only being attached to the real-world places from which they originate or which they represent, but also stories as places themselves to be transported to. Green and Brock explore reasons why transportation might be desirable (to escape, to learn), but perhaps it is necessary for the transmission of certain types of empathy and information. Many of these authors employ place-like metaphors to describe the character and function of narratives, and this may be a useful angle/framework to approach the power of these stories in relation to environmental studies.
Story as Technology
So, its possible that one could argue for a story to be an actual place, but while we are on this question of “what is a story?” there is another aspect that I found in Ursula Le Guin’s “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” in The Ecocritcism Reader (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996). This piece is going to be a fundamental metaphor in my work.
Le Guin begins by discussing the hypothetical pre-historical hunter/gatherer society where the hunting expedition brings back meat and action/hero stories, relying on spears and swords and other hard long objects of technology. On the other hand, perhaps the first and more important piece of technology is a container, a holder of things like meat or potatoes or oats or children. She sets up this container/stabber technology dichotomy (which is incredibly gendered, obviously) and then compares these different shapes to our narratives. The linear narrative with heroes and action and progress AND the idea of a story as a container and holder for meaning ( a concept I’m uncovering in my English senior seminar). While Le Guin argues against the linear, phallic norm, she also juxtaposes stories and technology.
Looking back on William Rueckert’s formative 1976 essay on the beginnings of ecocriticism in the same volume, he discusses the energy embedded within the “language and symbol-systems” (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996, p.109) inherent to human communities. This reminded me of another position I learned in my English courses: the concept of language as a technology. If language is technology, so must everything created with language including poems, novels, stories, narratives… In light of Love Your Monsters and the technological aspects of science fiction and the concept that we can invent ourselves out of the environmental crisis, the notion of a story as a piece of technology has huge implications for my project.
Loose Ends
Many of the humanities papers are seemingly unaware of social science perspectives AND contain huge generalizations about “the environmental crisis.”
These “environmental crises” that many of the authors write about have nothing to do with natural disasters, such as earthquakes, but everything to do with human-caused climate change and other Big Policy Questions. I know that earthquakes fit into environmental literature in fundamental ways, but perhaps not in the most sensation ways.
I have some big decisions to make about how to define a story or a narrative. A lot of nature writing is creative non-fiction and memoir. Do I want to stick to fiction? What are the purposes, benefits, and consequences of doing so? There is a great deal of situating within this genre of “narrative.” What is a story for the purposes of environmental studies?
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