Summary:
Exploring how imaginative literature has long raised awareness of troubled worlds, whether imagined, far away or hidden in plain sight, and offered alternatives, both cautionary and hopeful.
Description:
Almost from the beginning, literature has addressed the natural landscape and the human place within it. If the Romantics and Transcendentalists saw nature as a place of repose and spiritual renewal, the realist industrial novels of the nineteenth century and the Progressive era raised awareness of the life of factory workers and the environmental and public health problems caused by industrialization. Similar concerns about the machine can be seen today in climate fiction (cli-fi), in works about the costs of resource extraction and the dangers of the computer, and in films like Godard’s Alphaville or Kubrick’s 2001.
How relevant are these older works to today’s concerns? Some scholars argue for seeing the Romantic nature poets as precursors to “green movement poets” directly influenced by the modern environmental movement (Whitlark) or insist that poets can no longer conceive of nature as “rustic retreat” but instead must see it “a pressing political question, a question of survival” (Parini qtd in “Poetry & the Environment”).
However, many scholars see a rupture between traditional environmental literature and a newer ecopoetics. This module presents several recent definitions and discussions of ecopoetics and interrogates their usefulness for information professionals concerned about the environmental impacts of computing.
The Poetry Foundation (affiliated with Poetry magazine) concisely conceives ecopoetics as “not quite nature poetry.” Tremblay categorizes ecopoetics as both a “corpus of poetry” inspired by post-war experimental poetics and a “critical practice” that has become “an intersectional paradigm for evaluating the unevenly distributed effects of environmental degradation.” That is, ecopoetics offers a broader multidisciplinary perspective drawing on critical theory (especially poetics), but also science and environmental writing. For Killingsworth, from the perspective of writing studies and technical communication, ecopoetics is less about specific poems and more about the intersections between place, language, and mind. He explains “Ecopoetics tries to say what happens to the things and places of the earth—the mockingbird and the bluebonnet, the forest and the meadow—when we represent them in language […]—and in turn what happens to human thinking and behavior in the process” (367). He argues against leaving environmental writing to the experts and for “ecocomposition,” or the realization that every text arises within an environment.
Two recent scholarly monographs focus on ecopoetics by close readings of recent American poetry. The essays in Hume and Osborne’s edited collection address “a diversity of field-writing practices” (5) and trace four few categories: the apocalyptic, embodiment, environmental justice, and critiques of sustainability. Ronda’s Remainders considers the value of a belated cultural form like poetry in an era of natural devastation.
Readings:
Hume, Angela and Gillian Osborne, eds. Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. “From Environmental Rhetoric to Ecocomposition and Ecopoetics: Finding a Place for Professional Communication.” Technical Communication Quarterly 14.4 (2005): 359-373. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15427625tcq1404_1
Poetry Foundation, “Poetry and the Environment.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/146462/poetry-and-the-environment
Ronda, Margaret. Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018.
Tremblay, Jean-Thomas. “No More Nature: On Ecopoetics in the Anthropocene.” Los Angeles Review of Books. 24 June 2018. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-more-nature-on-ecopoetics-in-the-anthropocene/
Whitlark, James. “Green Movement Poets.” Salem Press Encyclopedia of Literature, 2017