Some words on ecocriticism

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(edited today feb 8 to correct framing of co-writing, you’ll see)

Although I would call myself a posthumanist, I am often misrecognized as an “animals guy” or even an ecocritic, so much so that I’ve found myself absurdly placed on the advisory boards of several book series and journals in animal studies and ecocriticism. Last semester, I leaned into the misapprehension by teaching a seminar on “Medieval Nature,” in part to try to be fairer to the books and manuscripts in medieval ecocriticism that I’m so often sent to evaluate.

For surely to be “moved in some invigorating fashion” is also to be irritated. I’ve been so irritated so often and for so long. Let me tell you how I am, why the sins of the field are so common, and, at last, who’s doing it as right as I think it can be done.

Medieval ecocriticism can do nothing for the present directly. It’s just too long ago, too far on the other side of the petroleum revolution to do anything about it. It often finds its consolations, then, in offering my period as a model of a better attitude towards the great outdoors. So much of this stuff seeks to ‘reënchant’ the ‘natural world’ by finding ‘deep’ connections between humans and nonhumans, delighting in moments that offer evidence of the recognition of nonhuman ‘agency,’ all with an aim to challenge ‘western’ ‘modern’ divisions between ‘nature and culture.’ So much of this stuff is mesmerized by the supposed less anthropocentric standpoints of ‘indigenous ways of knowing,’ whether this be some gestural invocation of the medieval or premedieval pagan, or some equally gestural invocation of American Indigeneity, which: no. I can tell you why the peremptory ‘no’ later if you like. And all of this is quite innocent of wondering whether changes in attitude necessarily ameliorate what we’re doing to life on our planet, a question definitively answered — “not really” — back in 1968 by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, RIP 4 years ago at age 81.^[1]

It’s not that no one’s doing it right now. But almost no one’s sending me their stuff to evaluate. Some work I like, though, goes like this:

The idiom of entanglement or enmeshment – whereby we are and should be one with a world of interconnection and interdependence that includes human and nonhuman life, the living and the nonliving – has been naturalized, so to speak, as ecology itself….The notion of ecological entanglement encounters little resistance from ecocritics, who instead strive to prove that we are entangled to a higher degree than previously imagined.^[3]

When I ran across this passage I just about shouted in relief: mon frère ! mon semblable !

That passage comes from Negative Life (2024), a collaborative production by Jean-Thomas Tremblay at York University in Canada and our CUNY colleague Steven Swarbrick, an early modernist and film guy in the English department at Baruch.^[2] Swarbrick most recently has published The Earth is Evil (2025). Both books set out on an anti-pastoral, anti-nostalgic assault on the praise of “enmeshment” and “entanglement” found in so much ecocriticism – at least of the premodern variety, although here I think too of the late work of Donna Haraway. Pastoral! Yes, there’s such a tendency to try to make us touch grass, that old habit of starting an ecoessay with a walk in the flowers, of telling us to put our hands and bodies in the dirt and to forget or overcome the difference through care and kinmaking and participation in resilience and vibrancy and vitality. And then, somehow, in the sympathy of the pastoral symphony, things get better.

Driven by suspicious psychoanalysis, especially of the Lacanian variety, The Earth is Evil calls for a “destituent ecology”^[4] that’s done without “fantasied [natural] coherence.”^[5] As much as I’m into Jameson on literature as “inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions,”^[6] I like how psychoanalysis complicates that division between the imaginary and the social, the fantasized and the real, so you never quite know where or I suppose if you’re standing. You can probably imagine where this goes next: blockages, obstacles, irrepressibility, lack, gaps, the unintelligible, and the like, not offered so much as the truth of things but as inevitable accompaniment. The “authentic” is always haunted.^[7] But, as Negative Life cautions, we need a brake too on the “crypto-pastoralism of radical negativity, which, taken to its logical extreme, mirrors its opposite: anodyne positivity.”^[8]

Here then I offer you my having been moved, the positive valence of irritation. I hope we can talk about it.

“Discrepancies between environmental attitude and behaviour: examples from Europe and China.” Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 12.3 (1968): 176-191 ↑
Some other work I like includes! Adam Mahler (medieval Iberianist finishing up a degree at Harvard, a great essay in Speculum on Portuguese trees and tree poetry that makes none of the errors I describe here); Sara Ritchey (a medievalist no longer in the profession, alas but understandable, and now running a private foundation in Louisiana: her Holy Matter is utterly admirable); David Hollingshead (at MacEwan University in Alberta, a superb 2022 essay on The Yellow Wall-Paper, “Domestic Ecology and Autoimmunity: Eugenic Feminism in the Sixth Extinction”); and, in animal studies, way back when now, U of Victoria’s Nicole Shukin (Animal Capital) and Mel Chen (Animacies), and, both at Duke, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson and Gabriel N. Rosenberg. I continue to have my eyes on the work of J Allen Mitchell (also U Vic) and Adin Lears (Virginia Commonwealth). ↑
Negative Life 11 ↑
Earth is Evil 16 ↑
Earth is Evil 33. The trick of course is to recognize that fantasy is inevitable. Coherent consciousness, which is to say, consciousness at however minimal a level, is necessarily ideological (Zizek). Any interaction is necessarily bounded (sometimes generatively) by the modes of engagement available to the interactants (Object-Oriented Ontology!). The trick isn’t to champion reality over ideology, then, because that way lies blehness. ↑
The Political Unconscious 79 ↑
Negative Life 94 ↑
Negative Life 84 ↑