"The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ecocriticism" by Ursula Heise
Although other important social movements of the 1960s and 1970s are felt in literary criticism much earlier, interest in environmental literary criticism builds in the 1980s and does not lead to the formation of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment until 1992. To account for the delay, Heise cites the development of literary theory between the late 1960s and early 1990s and literary critics' increasing awareness of "the multiple disjunctures between the forms of representation and the realities they purported to refer to" (505). She observes that in this context, literary critics tended to view nature as "a sociohistorical construct that had historically often served to legitimize the ideological claims of specific social groups" (505). "This perspective obviously did not encourage connections with a social movement aiming to reground human culture in natural systems and whose primary pragmatic goal was to rescue a sense of the reality of environmental degradation from the obfuscation of political discourse" (503). By the 1990s, Heise argues, literary criticism is no longer ruled by a dominant framework and ecocriticism finds its place. Where other postmodern forms of thought like feminism and critical race studies are concerned with redefining the human subject in relation to human others that have been denied subjecthood, ecocriticism seeks to redefine the human subject in relation to a nonhuman world that modernity presumes to know, control, and in doing so create as separate from itself. Alternatives to modernity imagined in this way included deep ecology, which emphasizes "the value of nature in and of itself, the equal rights of other species, and the importance of small communities" and social ecology, which values nature in its use for humans. The social ecology view has been increasingly prominent since the late 1990s. The engagement with the sociopolitical framing has also affected the way ecocritics look at the relationship between modernity and nature - where earlier work saw nature in opposition to and victimized by modernity, the two are now seen as entertwined. Looking at ecocriticism's relationship to sciene, Heise sees at one extreme critics who want to make evolitionary theory the foundation for literary study and consider culture in terms of what it accomplishes for the adaptation and survival of the species. While admiting that this approach will seem suspect to critics invested in thinking about cultural diversity, Heise suggests that, "If the adaptationist approach can produce an analysis of cultural and literary universals that is descriptive rather than normative and that does not rely on the values of one particular culture dressed up as human nature (as was usually done in earlier attempts to define universals), it deserves to be heard as a part of a full theory of culture" (509). At the other extreme Heise identifies poststructuralist or constructivist ecocritics who see nature itself as a construct - "while literary Darwinists subordinate cultural phenomena to scientific explanation, ecopoststructuralists subordinate material reality and its scientific explanation to cultural analysis. Ecocritical inquiry, most of which dopts a more dialectical perspective on the relation between culture and science, plays itself out in the tension between these two extremes" (511). Heise predicts that because of the unusefulness of strong constructivist arguments to green activism, ecocritics will tend toward a weak constructivist positions that "analyze cultural constructions of nature with a view toward the constraints that the real environment imposes on them" (512). Heise notes that ecocriticism is striking for its theoretical diversity, its interdisciplinarity and the rapid expansion of its cannon. Ecocriticism has been largely confined to Anglophone literature, and Heise suggests that it is in need of critical work in other languages and of closer engagement with theories of globalization.
Heise, Ursula. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ecocriticism." PMLA 121.2. (2006): 503-516.