The Greening Of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and he Environment
306
The Greening Of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and he Environment
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Overview
Each essay in this impressive collection challenges the notion that the study of environmental literature is separate from traditional concerns of criticism, and each applies ecocritical scholarship to literature not commonly explored in this context. New historicism, postcolonialism, deconstructionism, and feminist and Marxist theories are all utilized to evaluate and gain new insights into environmental literature; at the same time, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Upton Sinclair, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Susan Howe are studied from an ecocritical perspective. At its core, The Greening of Literary Scholarship offers a practical demonstration of how articulating traditional and environmental modes of literary scholarship can enrich the interpretation of literary texts and, most important, revitalize the larger fields of environmental and literary scholarship.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781587294143 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 306 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Greening of Literary Scholarship Literature, Theory, and the Environment
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS
Copyright © 2002 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87745-803-6
Chapter One Saving All the Pieces The Place of Textual Editing in Ecocriticism MICHAEL P. BRANCH
[W]ho but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. -Aldo Leopold, Round River
THE VALUE OF TEXTUAL EDITING TO ECOCRITICISM
When ecologists and conservation biologists theorize the study, alteration, or restoration of natural ecosystems, they often begin with the maxim that it is imperative to "save all the pieces"-that however else humans might alter the patterns of nature, we should be certain that our intervention does not result in the extinction of a plant or animal that may ultimately prove vital to the healthy functioning of the ecosystem. This essay argues that a full understanding of the American land and its various literary representations will require that scholars of environmental literature dedicate themselves to the preservation and restoration of the many rare, corrupted, or otherwise "endangered" texts upon which that full understanding may ultimately depend. In the first part of the essay, I speculate upon why ecocritics have not widely recognized the value of textual editing, and I suggest a number of reasons why textual editing should receive more attention in ecocritical studies. In order to make more clear how the practicalwork of textual editing contributes to the ecocritical enterprise, I devote the second part of the essay to five short case studies-one from each of the past five centuries-of textually edited books that significantly enhance our understanding of the North American landscape and its various cultural and literary representations.
By "textual editing," I mean the scholarly work of preparing unpublishedmaterials for publication, recovering the texts of works that have appeared in corrupted editions, or presenting particularly obscure or inaccessible works in editions that make the work comprehensible and useful to a nonspecialist audience. Although "textual editing" is the older and more expansive term, "documentary editing" is sometimes preferred by those wishing to distance themselves from the substantial editorial liberties taken by many early textual editors, while "historical editing" or "literary editing" is favored among those wishing to identify their work primarily according to the discipline in which it occurs. I prefer the term "textual editing" for its inclusiveness while nevertheless avoiding the troubling generality of the term "scholarly editing." By my operational definition, then, textual editors are those scholars who discover, recover, and clearly present previously unknown, unavailable, or unusable documents.
Textual editing has long been understood as central to the project of literary and cultural studies, especially in such areas as medieval and Renaissance literature, where the rarity of many texts renders their proper preservation and presentation essential to the scholar's enterprise. Indeed, the past century has seen remarkable advances in the technologies and techniques of textual editing, such that Fredson Bowers, who was among the first American literary scholars to draw attention to the need for textual editing and to articulate explicitly a set of principles by which it should be done, could in 1976 claim that "when the history of scholarship in the twentieth century comes to be written, a very good case should be made for calling it the age of editing" (Kline xvi). Major projects in American textual editing began as early as the 1830s and gained momentum after the Civil War. By 1934, Congress had created the National Historical Publications Commission, and by the late 1940s the first variorum and genetic texts were being produced by Bowers and other mid-twentieth-century editors of American literature. By 1963, the Modern Language Association had created the Center for Editions of American Authors (succeeded in 1976 by the Center for Scholarly Editions), an influential institution that, with funding support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, went on to publish its Statement of Editorial Principles (1967) and to encourage and certify the proper editing of literary texts (Kline 3- 8). Meanwhile, the formation of the Association for Documentary Editing in 1978 created a scholarly community for textual editors in all disciplines. The next generation of textual editing technology may be suggested by the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia, established in 1992, which uses recent technologies to make full texts of literary works available electronically and which tries to offer layered hypertext constellations in which edited texts are augmented by manuscript, typescript, or textual variants, as well as enhanced by illustrative images and sound and appropriate critical, historical, and biographical works (Electronic Text Center, homepage).
Despite the prominence and importance of textual editing-and the wide recognition of its value in many specialties of literary studies-scholars of environmental literature have been slow to recognize the need for and importance of textual editing. While the reasons for this ecocritical lacuna are many, we might consider several of the more important. First, our working definition of nature writing has, as the contents of The Norton Book of Nature Writing perhaps suggest, until recently been limited to the nonfiction personal essay that sympathetically describes nature and the authorial response to it-a quite modern literary subgenre that has thus required relatively little textual editing. Indeed, the assumption that nature writing should respond to immediate environmental problems has forced ecocritical attention not only toward the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but toward the handful of well-known contemporary environmental writers whose work appears to address most directly the current crisis.
Second, few ecocritics are adequately trained in methodologies of textual editing. While most literary scholars receive years of instruction in the myriad ways of taking a text apart analytically, very few are trained in the painstaking techniques necessary to put a text together literally-or put it back together when it has been corrupted by a complicated textual history. No graduate degree exists for those wishing to receive scholarly training as textual editors, and even advanced courses in the subject are rare. Although the past decade has seen the publication of a number of book-length guides to the practice and principles of textual editing-those by Kline, Sharpe and Gunther, and Stevens and Burg are especially helpful-many scholars remain understandably intimidated by an enterprise that Arthur Plotnik describes as "an excruciating act of self-discipline, mind-reading, and stable cleaning" (34).
Third, those American works least known to ecocritics and most in need of textual editing are often from the precolonial, colonial, and Revolutionary periods-periods traditionally underrepresented in ecocritical studies. Unfortunately, ecocritics often find these older works too historically dense or theologically inflected, too alien in their generic forms or rhetorical conventions, or too unsympathetic in their ideological approaches to nature. However, if ecocritics are to construct a more complete and accurate understanding of how landscapes are understood and depicted in literature, it is essential that we broaden our thinking to imagine nature writing as a category that includes sermons, settlement narratives, and government reports-as well as personal essays-and that we recover and examine the works of earlier writers who may be overlooked because their understanding of the natural world is predicated upon ideological or aesthetic assumptions different from our own.
Finally, the academy has often failed to provide adequate incentive or reward for textual editing, leaving too many textual editors to pursue their work without necessary support from the institutions within which they work. Until recently, the profession has tended to value a critical article published in a narrowly read academic journal over a restored, reintroduced text that might substantially inform our understanding of how the landscapes of North America have been engaged and represented in the literature of the past five centuries. While part of this institutional attitude stems from our culture's Emersonian preference for work that is clearly identifiable as the fruit of individual genius-that is, writing is seen as one's own work while editing may be seen as tinkering with the product of someone else's genius-it is more often the case that the apparently arcane work of the textual editor is simply not understood and, until better understood, cannot be valued more highly.
Despite the various and compelling disincentives to ecocritical textual editing, the arguments for the value and use of such editing are yet more compelling. Before offering several practical examples of textually edited books that are vital to the ecocritical enterprise, I wish to suggest several important ways ecocriticism can benefit from a greater recognition of the value of textual editing.
As I have suggested, the circumscription of ecocritical attention to post-Thoreauvian nature writing deprives us of a full understanding of American attitudes toward and descriptions of the land. Textual editing can help to recover and reintroduce the many now obscure texts upon which Thoreau and his literary descendants both consciously and unconsciously based their work. By "saving all the pieces"-or saving as many of the pieces as are extant and recoverable-we will increase the likelihood that our scholarly reconstruction of America's literary environmental history will be complete and accurate. In using textual editing to cultivate this deeper appreciation for early American literary representations of the land, our work will also establish historical context within which the post-Thoreauvian literature of nature may be better understood.
Ecocriticism will also be enriched by new attention to works in genres other than the nonfiction essay. Textual editing can help make more accessible American environmental writing in such less familiar rhetorical forms as the exploration account, settlement narrative, promotional tract, spiritual autobiography, sermon, diary, letter, or scientific report. Because the nonfiction personal essay has, like all literary genres, developed a set of conventions that privilege certain assumptions about the author and the world-in this case, assumptions such as the availability of leisure time, the primacy of personal experience, the inherent value of philosophical reflection, and the beneficence of nature-it tends to offer a deep but rather narrow view of how writers have perceived and represented American environments. Because textual editing invites and encourages the careful study of documents in a number of literary and nonliterary rhetorical forms, it promotes a salutary widening of the ecocritical focus.
Ecocriticism also needs to look more closely at works that express what seems an anthropocentric or even a destructively instrumentalist approach toward nature. By restoring and contextualizing works that represent the land in ways we now find ideologically offensive, textual editing can help reveal the origins of ideas that have often resulted in the degradation of American environments. We need to study literary representations that may offend precisely because their thorough theologizing of landscape may be alien to our modern secular sensibility, or because their scientific understanding of nature is by our own standards so fatally flawed, or because their mercantilist interpretation of the landscape appears so reductive in its ignorance of the aesthetic and spiritual value of the natural world. Only in this way might we begin to transcend the inevitable limitations of our own vision in order to catch glimpses of this land from the points of view of those who came before us-and only in this sympathetic engagement of other perspectives can we fully understandthe roots of our own environmental assumptions and values, however different from those of our predecessors.
Finally, in its effort to identify the roots of a sustainable land ethic, ecocriticism must also continue to search for a marginalized tradition of American literature in which love of the land finds expression. Textual editing can help us discover works that-precisely because of their iconoclastic or unpopular celebration of nature-have been suppressed, corrupted, or lost. The aphorism that "the winners write the histories" suggests the predicament of the American environmental historian or ecocritic, for the dominant American environmental ethic has long been one of instrumental valuation, capitalist utility, and short-term profit. This dominant, utilitarian ethic has ensured that, until fairly recently, the attention and resources of publishers, funding sources, and paying audiences have been directed primarily toward writing that maintains the status quo while refusing to ask challenging questions about the sustainability and wisdom of this dominant environmental ethic. Thus textual editing is particularly valuable in helping us discover and restore otherwise obscure texts whose environmental sympathy or advocacy may have caused them to meet with resistance at all levels of cultural production and dissemination.
FIVE EXAMPLES OF ECOCRITICAL TEXTUAL EDITING By "ecocritical textual editing," I refer not to a specific editing methodology but rather to any work of documentary editing that contributes to a more complete understanding of our environmental literary history. In this part of the essay, I have chosen one primary text from each of the past five centuries to illustrate the value of textual editing to ecocritical scholarship. In each case the work in question has remained practically inaccessible until relatively recently, and in each case the work has, since its editing and republication, substantially influenced the way we understand literary representations of the American land. In a very brief discussion of each of these exemplary works, I explain how the text was initially corrupted or lost, how it was recovered and restored by the textual editor(s), and how its accessibility contributes to our understanding of environmental values and landscape representations in the literature of its period.
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, La Relación (1542), translated and edited by Cyclone Covey in 1998 as Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America First published in 1542, Cabeza de Vaca's La Relación is among the most fascinating and valuable sixteenth-century accounts of New World exploration. In it, the author describes his epic eight-year journey across the then unknown wilderness of what is now the American Gulf Coast and Southwest. As one of only four survivors of the disastrous three hundred-person Narváez expedition of 1527, Cabeza de Vaca managed-by courage, resourcefulness, perseverance, and luck-to survive shipwreck, storms, hunger, thirst, exposure, illness, injury, enslavement, and attacks by Native Americans. He lived to tell the story of his six thousand-mile walk across what is now Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico. By turns adventure story, autobiography, travel narrative, anthropological tract, and nature writing, La Relación describes the land and its native inhabitants and narrates Cabeza de Vaca's remarkable personal transformation from conquistador to castaway to merchant to slave to faith healer.
Although it is now among the best-known and most widely appreciated sixteenth-century accounts of New World exploration, La Relación has had a long and complicated textual history. First published in 1542, the book was followed by a second edition, misleadingly retitled Naufragios (Shipwrecks), in 1555. This second edition, prepared by a different publisher, introduced chapter titles and made other substantial structural changes to the original text. In addition to these two editions, there existed a rare, earlier document called the Joint Report, prepared by Cabeza de Vaca and two of his fellow survivors in Mexico City in 1536. Although the original of this document did not survive, a 1539 copy of it was included in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés's important book Historia General y Natural de las Indias ... (General and natural history of the Indies ...), published in several volumes throughout the mid-sixteenth century. Because the Joint Report includes information that is essential to a full understanding of the events described in La Relación, it constitutes an indispensable part of Cabeza de Vaca's story.
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