Here I examine several articles from recent issues of environmental studies journals and practice applying their methods to my own inquiry.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
This is the official journal of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). It examines the relationships between humans and the natural world from a literary standpoint and publishes work from various scholars in the humanities. In addition to history, economics, philosophy, literature, ecology, and other academic fields, this journal published creative work such as poetry, fiction, and creative-nonfiction.
Select articles:
Goldberg, Paul. 2016.”Narco-Pastoral: Drug Trafficking, Ecology, and the Trope of the Noble Campesino in Three Mexican Narconovelas. “Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 23: 30-50.
Goldberg writes to address the use of the pastoral genre in novels about the drug-trafficking in Mexico. He is motivated by the lack of attention paid to this formal decision and its contribution to the texts’ social and environmental criticism. His primary question is how the pastoral genre used in the narco-novela utilizes tropes to render the relationship between drug trafficking and environmental destruction and idealism. His data are specifically three Mexican novelas. He examines their plots, characters, and passages that deal with the natural world. He approaches his analysis through the lens of the pastoral genre. He concludes that, although the common conception is that narco fiction is that it is an urban genre, the production of drugs is an agricultural and rural endeavor. Further, the pastoral trope works to reinforce the social, political, and environmental messages embedded in the novels.
Huggan, Graham. 2016. “From Arctic Dreams to Nightmares (and back again): Apocalyptic Thought and Planetary Consciousness in Three Contemporary American Environmentalist Texts.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 23: 71-91.
Huggan writes to apply a discourse analysis of the themes of apocalypse and planetary scales to three texts in the tradition of American environmental writing. He distinguishes these as nightmare and dream. He directs his attention to the Arctic as an key setting both in literary discourse and modern environmental discourse. His motivation is to situate three texts in the genre of American environmental literature by analyzing the text’s treatment of the Arctic in apocalyptic and planetary terms. His line of inquiry is this: how do Marla Cone’s Silent Snow, Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Winter, and Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe render the relationship between apocalyptic thought and planetary consciousness within an Arctic setting? His data was these three texts (a travel narrative, an ecological expose, and a piece of investigative journalism). He evaluated the content of these texts along the frameworks of apocalyptic thought (derived from canon works in American environmentalism), planetary consciousness (derived from the same), and the symbolic status of the Arctic setting derived from literary Romanticism as well as environmental rhetoric. His key conclusion is that we must resituate the Arctic to ensure that its place as a symbol of apocalyptic foreboding in the dreams and nightmares of outsiders do not overshadow the dreams and nightmares of the region’s own inhabitants.
This journal collects and publishes empirical and theoretical scholarship addressing the influence of physical environments on human behavior at various scales (individual, group, institution). It is both internationally focused and interdisciplinary. It shares many concerns with the field of environmental psychology.
Selected article:
I found that the two articles from the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment were incredible helpful in seeing eco-criticism in action. In particular, I was intrigued by the Goldberg article’s use of the pastoral genre as a criteria to further his analysis. In particular this is useful for me because I aim to use the genre (and conventions thereof) of science fiction as a criteria for analysis. I also found the analysis of the texts themselves in both of these articles useful in seeing how a literary close-reading can complement a discourse analysis. There was a woven quality of the Huggan article that nicely combined literary and environmental studies theory and discourse. In the Huggan article as well, the discussion of the role of apocalyptic rhetoric and symbol was perhaps directly useful for my own examination of earthquake narratives. I may draw directly from this paper and its source material to create a similar profile of the apocalypse tradition in both literary and environmental terms.