Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction

This collection of essays follows upon the success of a previous special issue of English Studies focused on ecocriticism, edited by Astrid Bracke and Marguérite Corporaal and published in November 2010. In their introduction to that collection of essays, Bracke and Corporaal argue that ecocriticism, or the “study of human–nature relations in literature, film and other cultural expressions”, has grown beyond its initial parameters within American and British nature writing to occupy a spot “at the forefront of current trends in the study of literatures in English”.¹ Adding to this growth, the essays in Bracke and Corporaal’s issue reflect new developments in ecocriticism at the time, especially contemporary novels by writers such as Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy and Kim Stanley Robinson that “express the ambivalence of the contemporary situation in which nature is either idealized or lamented; present or irretrievably lost”.² Particularly interesting to the contributors in the special issue are the various ways that these narratives engage the theme of the apocalypse.

Ecocriticism has continued to grow since the publication of Bracke and Corporaal’s issue, especially in terms of its relationship to narrative. A rich site of this growth is in ecocriticism’s interest in narrative form. While—as the shared focus on the theme of apocalypse in the 2010 special issue suggests—traditionally ecocritics have privileged the content of narratives over their form, an increasing number of scholars interested in the intersections of literature and environment are turning their attention to the very structures by which narratives represent and construct environments for their readers, and are thus increasingly engaging in the concepts and lexicon of narratology, or narrative theory. The essays in this special issue reflect this growth and identify rich new directions for ecocritical and narratological scholarship.

The Turn Towards Narrative Theory

To appreciate the turn towards narrative theory within ecocriticism and the relevance of this development to English studies, it helps to survey the evolution of the ecocritical scholarship. While what counts as ecocriticism remains open to discussion, ecocritics still frequently invoke some or all of Cheryll Glotfelty’s pioneering statement in The Ecocriticism Reader (1996) that

simply put, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.³

Strategically capacious, this initial framing of ecocriticism’s scope does more to propose a field of inquiry than a set of tools for working in that field. Critics from within and without have sometimes bemoaned this breadth, latching onto phrases such as Lawrence Buell’s that ecocriticism “lacks the kind of paradigm-defining statement that, for example, Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) supplied for colonial discourse studies.”⁴ Yet, as its wide citation would suggest, Glotfelty’s definition may explain why ecocriticism has fostered various projects—without a single voice to direct scholarship, there are more seats at the table for those interested in joining a scholarly conversation.

Likewise, ecocriticism’s object of study has proved more dynamic than static. In his 2005 articulation of ecocriticism’s genealogy, Buell inaugurated a wave metaphor for charting the field’s expanding purview across a number of related but distinct axes.⁵ In brief, it suggests a starting point in American nature writing with criticism geared toward conservation, a second wave of more diverse texts paired with more attention to urban environments and social justice scholarship, and a third wave that pays greater attention to postcolonial critique and more sustained attention to issues of theory. As different critical interests found their entry points, the bibliographies of ecocriticism opened to new genres, more diverse voices (within and across national frameworks) and different environmental issues. One result of this is that, although ecocriticism remains heavily invested in North American and other Anglophone writers, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)—the main ecocritical professional organisation—also has one of the widest global networks of any literary field of study. The wave metaphor has had its critics for some time; in their introduction to Postcolonial Ecologies, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley vigorously query the genealogical narratives ecocritics rehearse, noting that “ecocriticism is particularly vulnerable to naturalizing dominant forms of environmental discourse, particularly those that do not fundamentally engage with questions of difference, power, and privilege”.⁶ The wave metaphor may be floundering altogether as new sets of issues attract scholars whose bibliographies no longer rely on the ecocritical studies it organises; topics such as the Anthropocene (the idea that humanity now lives in a new geological epoch defined by the carbon-burning activities of humans), materiality and animal studies are grafting ecocritical concerns to broader cultural and sometimes scientific studies. Ecocriticism today appears more like a banyan tree than a series of waves—branches extend to form alternative yet interconnected trunks.

This issue’s exploration of ecocriticism’s turn towards narrative theory, then, likewise presents a new branch that may find its own ground from which to contribute to the whole. As the banyan metaphor suggests, ecocritical considerations of form do not grow entirely out of nowhere; ecocritical attention to narrative as such has been scant, but not nonexistent. Perhaps because ASLE maintains an active community of creative writers, some of the most direct attention has been from a practice-oriented side. It is noted science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, for example, who contributed “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” to The Ecocriticism Reader, an essay that reflects on conflict’s centrality within notions of plot; in terms of narrative theory, Le Guin’s question might be recognised as an experiment in pushing past agonistic models of narrativity. Terre Satterfield and Scott Slovic have likewise featured writers’ voices in their collection of interviews, What’s Nature Worth?: Narrative Expressions of Environmental Values. Combining their anthropological and literary training, Satterfield and Slovic primarily investigate narrative as a communicative tool capable of bypassing oppositions that arise in standard deliberative discourse. The twelve writers, ranging from Simon Ortiz to Alison Hawthorne Deming to Robert Michael Pyle, complicate the interviewers’ assumptions in various ways. Ofelia Zepeda challenges whether an overarching category like “story” can hold meaningfully; William Kittridge suggests that narrative may not persuade readers as much as inspire them to generate their own stories that in turn prompt more complex judgments.

By contrast, the critical work on narrative forms has been slower in coming. This may partly result from some of Buell’s formative early work in the field. In The Environmental Imagination (1995), he sets out to think through what aesthetics are most conducive to “ecocentric” ethics.⁷ He proposes: “But what sort of literature remains possible if we relinquish the myth of human apartness? It must be a literature that abandons, or at least questions, what would seem to be literature’s most basic foci: character, persona, narrative consciousness.”⁸ The outcome is a preference for genres like the nature essay (and especially, for Buell, the oeuvre of Henry David Thoreau) that embrace digression and exposition. Buell would walk these claims back in his next major ecocritical book—“Argument can state, but narrative can actually dramatize”—yet consideration of narrative structures has tended to stay separate from and in a subservient role relative to ethical discourse in much ecocritical scholarship.⁹

Although Buell did not go on to devote extensive attention to narrative’s power to dramatise, Ursula Heise considers this and other narrative functions in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008). This study, which garnered intense ecocritical focus for its argument to refocus the scale of concern from the local to the global, received less attention for the extent to which it argued for attending to the “challenges” of “narrative patterns” entailed by the scalar shift.¹⁰ Narrative formats like the ramble in the nearby wild, she contends, seldom rise to the challenge of addressing the risk scenarios posed by destabilisation of geophysical forces and patterns. As her interest in “allegory and collage” suggests, Heise considers the worldviews that different forms and media encode in addition to what they directly dramatise. Heise repeats this call for sensitivity to narrative structures in her afterword to Bonnie Roos and Alex Hunt’s Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narrative (2010), in which she urges ecocritical scholars to consider the “question of the aesthetic”.¹¹ She notes that ecocritical analyses “have often tended to assess creative works most centrally in terms of whether they portray the realities of social oppression and environmental devastation accurately, and what ideological perspectives they imply,” and that such assessments are undoubtedly necessary. But she also states bluntly that “if factual accuracy, interesting political analysis, or wide public appeal is what we look for, there are better and more straightforward places to find them than novels and poems”. Her primary interest thus lies in the “aesthetic transformation of the real”, which she reminds readers has “a particular potential for reshaping the individual and collective ecosocial imaginary”. Nancy Easterlin shares with Heise the interest in what forms and media do. In her “biocultural” work that brings together evolutionary history and cognitive science to bear on questions of literary theory, she admirably explains the misguidedness of much ecocriticism that tries to find the genre or form that will “palliate the soul” to “culminate in an environmentally friendly perspective”.¹² Instead, she explains the interest of narrative as an “agentive force”, writing that “integrating the actions and purposes of human groups within their prescribed domain, narrative brings into relation and coordinates sequence, causality, physical place, knowledge of interaction with human others, and self-concept”.¹³ In these terms, the stakes proliferate for studying narrative workings more widely and not only specific narrative genres, especially as ecocritics mull over the complexities of nature-cultures and their networks.

As Heise’s and Easterlin’s work already outlines, consideration of narrative forms stands to sophisticate or outright complicate existing ecocritical arguments that favour genres such as comedy, the nature essay, the pastoral, the georgic, the realist novel, the picaresque, science fiction and posthuman cinema—among others—as ideally suited for raising environmental consciousness.¹⁴ Such ecocritical attention to form also offers a language for tracing the connections and disjunctures among narrative genres in ways that may prove conducive to generating new narratives. As ecocritical scholarship invested in narrative form limns more connections between lived environments and narrative understanding, it may renew ecocritical attention to poetics in the etymological sense of poiesis, “to make from”. Recently, and with good reason, scholars of ecopoetics have advocated a similar turn away from searching out the most ecologically minded poetic structures and instead toward, as Sarah Nolan puts it, attention to

various situations in which individual memory, personal experience, ideology, and the limitations of the sense intermingle with natural elements of experience and on how new forms and experimentation with language can work to express these facets of experience as accurately as possible.¹⁵

Heise and Easterlin might both query the final stress on accuracy, but the type of ecocritical scholarship that the essays in this special issue reflects shares with ecopoetics the attempt to move past whatever remains of the “ecocritical discomfort with language and aesthetics” that Scott Knickerbocker identifies in his framing of ecopoetics.¹⁶ In this sense, one way to think about an ecocriticism attentive to narrative forms may be as an ecopoetics of narrative.

Other scholars are explicit about their pairing of ecocriticism and narrative theory. In his groundbreaking 2013 essay “Natural Environments in Narrative Contexts: Cross-Pollinating Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory”, Markku Lehtimäki argues that tools developed by scholars of narrative have great ecocritical significance, as they “can be used to explore how cultural practices pertain to the natural ecologies with which they are interwoven”.¹⁷ Of special interest to Lehtimäki are two key questions:

How might an author’s concern with a particular kind of ecology motivate the use of specific forms? How can techniques for consciousness presentation … be leveraged to suggest how characters’ experiences both shape and are shaped by their engagement with aspects of the natural world?¹⁸

Erin James similarly makes a case for the ecocritical relevance of narratological concepts and lexicon in The Storyworld Accord: Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Narratives (2015). James joins the two modes of reading in what she calls “econarratology”, or the pairing of “ecocriticism’s interest in the relationship between literature and the physical environment with narratology’s focus on the literary structures and devices by which writers compose narratives”.¹⁹ She places special emphasis on the process of reading—on what happens to readers when they mentally inhabit the imagined environments of narratives—and positions econarratology as particularly adept at studying

the storyworlds that readers simulate and transport themselves to when reading narratives, the correlations between such textual, imaginative worlds and the physical, extratextual world, and the potential of the reading process to foster awareness and understanding for different environmental imaginations and experiences.²⁰

Alexa Weik von Mossner also is interested in what happens in the minds and bodies of readers when they read narratives in Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (2017). Her analyses of American texts (literary and cinematic) employ ideas from affect studies and cognitive narratology to study readers’ emotional engagement with environmental narratives, exploring, among other issues, how such narratives can invite readers to care for human and nonhuman others subject to environmental injustice.

This initial work offers literary critics a strong foundation by which to pair ecocriticism and narrative theory in their own scholarship. It makes clear that narrative theory, though its vocabulary can sometimes seem burdensome, can equip ecocritics to articulate in new ways how environmental attitudes get conveyed. New scholarship might push this project even further. For example, ecocritics might engage the terminology of the disnarrated, proposed by Gerald Prince and developed by feminist narratologist Robyn Warhol. Whereas Prince referred to “those passages in a narrative that consider what did not or does not take place”, Warhol coins the “unnarrated” to categorise “those passages in a narrative that explicitly do not tell what is supposed to have happened, foregrounding the narrator’s refusal to narrate”.²¹ Because the reasons for this refusal could be several, she suggests four other terms that might refine questions. An ecocritic might use these terms to ask, for example, why more contemporary narratives don't give attention to toxic waste. Is toxicity so expected and banal that novels do not need to narrate it (subnarratable)? Is language inadequate to describe it (supranarratable)? Do novels avoid talking about it (and whom it affects disproportionately) because of taboo (antinarratable)? Does it simply not fit into existing generic conventions (paranarratable)? All of these categories speak to literary and cultural norms in ways ecocritics have sometimes even claimed but that narrative theory has named via terms that can facilitate communication outside of individual ecocritical projects.

Still other new scholarship might push the pairing of ecocriticism and narrative theory in different directions, such as towards one of ecocriticism’s most recent areas of interest, new materialism. Spearheaded by the work of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, material ecocriticism extends ecocriticism’s pre-existing interests in the material by treating material as text (not simply material as represented in text). Accordingly, Iovino and Oppermann write, “material ecocriticism traces the trajectories of natural–cultural intersections by reading them as ‘material narratives’”; elsewhere, they speak of “storied matter”.²² The material, as their analytic approach would have it, bears telling traces of the interplaying agencies that bring it into being. But the slipperiness of narrative and story in these usages risks undermining the strengths of literary and cultural scholars that they appear to invoke. What differentiates narrative or story here from mere sequence? Do these narratives have narratees—who or what would they be? There are many questions concerning the “narrative agency of matter” that ecocritical analyses of narrative forms might pose to further sophisticate these and similar projects animating wide-spread interest.²³

The pairing of ecocriticism and narrative theory also stands to strengthen the bridge between critical scholarship and creative practice that has long interested scholars of literature and the environment. Many ecocritics have advocated for narrative scholarship—that is, delivering critical arguments through narrative—as an approach that allows for remembering the critic’s embeddedness in space and time. Slovic makes this point emphatically, writing even that “ecocriticism without narrative is like stepping off the face of a mountain—it’s the disoriented language of free fall”; narrative scholarship, for him, promotes “awareness, literally, of where we stand in the world and why we’re writing”.²⁴ Subscribing to this view would suggest that familiarity with narrative theory would allow ecocritics to make even more aware narrative choices. Another resonant example of narrative scholarship is Iovino’s work on re-inhabitation of the Po Valley in Italy. She proposes “narrative rehabilitation” as based in place-based stories that draw attention to “values and responsibilities” but also “envisio[n] … suitable strategies of change in the form of possible narrative ‘endings’”.²⁵ Thinking of narrative as a practice for living in a place likely will not come as a surprise to members of indigenous communities that have drawn on narrative epistemologies for millennia before narrative theory or ecocriticism existed. As Daniel Wildcat puts it, indigenous knowledges often consist of “collaborations … emergent from the nature–culture nexus”; such knowledges suggest that stories are intimately tied to the places they are told, and visa versa.²⁶ It would be a mistake to simply superimpose narrative theory onto indigenous texts, as narrative theory has developed primarily in a Western framework closely tied to scientific projects at times at odds with indigenous interests. Yet conversation among these different frameworks may nonetheless illuminate productive points of convergence that help storytellers communicate. By putting into relief storytellers’ different methods and purposes, the pairing of ecocriticism and narrative theory may even help train more creative listeners.

Finally, as the essays in this special issue deftly suggest, ecocritical concepts and traditions also stand to make timely and provocative expansions of narratological work. A major trend within narrative scholarship over the past fifteen years has been a “spatial turn”, in which narratologists pivot from their traditional focus on classifications of narrative time to consider categories of narrative spatialisation. This turn, clearly evident in David Herman’s seminal 2001 essay “Spatial Reference in Narrative Domains”, Elana Gomel’s Narrative Space and Time: Representing Impossible Topologies in Literature and Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote and Moaz Azaryahu's new book Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet (2016), has much to gain from rich ecocritical considerations of the differences between place and space. Ecocritics habitually bring attention to specific places as well as nonplaces to think about how various ethical relationships to settings adhere, which can factor in a strand of narrative ethics to these studies. This is especially salient because various ecocritics have explored ways that writers known for their attention to place and space derive their intimate knowledge; these include types of movement, such as walking, but also storytelling itself, raising questions about the conveying of space through the interaction of diegetic levels. As several contributors in this special issue demonstrate, this insight productively complicates discussions of narrative spatialisation and setting.

Likewise, ecocritical considerations of the more-than-human world and posthuman environments have much to add to recent narratological analyses of representations of the nonhuman in narratives. Narrative theorists have long argued that, while not every narrator is human, all narrators by necessity have human characteristics. But a bloom of recent work inspired by a growing interest in the ways in which narratives can foster empathy and care for nonhuman characters is complicating the anthropocentric assumptions that underlie essential narratological questions such as “Who speaks?” and “Who sees?”. Recent essays such as Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck’s “The Storied Lives of Non-human Narrators” and David Herman’s “Narratology Beyond the Human” question the ability of narratives to represent the experiences of nonhuman others free of human interference.²⁷ By exploring the politics of readers’ empathy for nonhuman narrators and positioning narratives as important imaginative tools by which readers situate themselves within broad ecological networks, respectively, this scholarship queries how narratives can challenge readers’ conceptions of what it means to be human and how nonhuman characters and actants express their agency. This work clearly appeals to ecocritical conversations that pose precisely these questions.

In This Issue

The six essays in this special issue illustrate various ways that ecocriticism and narrative theory can productively inform each other. Foregrounding issues such as narration, the implied author, spatialisation, focalisation, progression, unreliability, second-person address, heteroglossia and the chronotope, they showcase how narratological concepts and vocabulary can re-energise analyses of literary and physical environments. They also demonstrate how concepts more familiar to ecocritical scholarship, such as genre, landscape, scale and the Anthropocene, can be helpfully rethought in light of narratological insights. Above all, they emphasise the widespread applicability of scholarship that combines ecocriticism and narrative theory. Ranging from Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno to Kem Nunn’s surf novels, from oil spill memoirs to game survey reports to graphic novels, the breadth of primary texts in these essays signals the broad appeal of ecocritical and narratological modes of reading literature and culture, especially for texts written in the English-speaking world.

In “‘Effective joint action’ in Wildlife Management: Ethos, Character, and Network in Aldo Leopold’s North Central States Report”, Daniel Cryer revisits the work of an author seminal to ecocritical scholarship to examine the narrative strategies that made it so successful. Cryer identifies two narrative structures in particular—character narration and progression—that helped Leopold bring together the bureaucrats, hunters, researchers, sportsmen and game breeders that composed the disparate audience of his first book. Cryer also examines how Leopold, via the report’s ethos and implied author, constructs a persona not common in similar scientific writings of his time but one that would become standard in the field for decades. Whereas Cryer’s essay uses narratological concepts to re-examine the work of a writer familiar to ecocritics, Dana Phillips’ essay employs a narratological lens to open up ecocritical scholarship to the novels of a particular writer—and, more broadly, an entire genre—that has thus far been largely overlooked by ecocritics. In “Nature as Noir: Kem Nunn’s California, ‘Where the Sewage Meets the Sea’”, Phillips argues that noir narratives are particularly adept at representing today’s degraded environments. He foregrounds the alternative model of California to that suggested by the images of sunshine and beaches in popular discourse that appears in Nunn’s novels. Positioning Nunn’s version of the “Golden State” as violent and isolated, unpleasant and overdeveloped, Phillips argues that it is the texts’ playful take on noir traditions that allow them to so effectively represent today’s “dark” nature. Furthermore, Phillips highlights the ecocritical usefulness of Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope (the time–space frame of a narrative) to understanding how narratives represent environments.

The second pair of essays in this special issue emphasise particular environments in their pairing of ecocritical and narratological modes of reading to suggest that certain physical environments match well with certain narrative structures. Marta Puxan-Oliva’s essay, “Colonial Oceanic Environments, Law and Narrative in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and Juan Benet’s Sub rosa”, argues that the environmental imagination of oceans in colonial literature, dominated by the legal ambivalence of international waters, lends itself well to narrative unreliability. Via her analysis of Melville’s and Benet’s texts, she charts the ways in which narratives often highlight the colonial ocean’s liberation from social, legal and political constraints via unreliable narrators. She uses this discussion of legal ambiguity and narrative unreliability to stress the importance of historicising narrative space when analysing narrative spatialisation. In “Petronarratology: A Bioregional Approach to Oil Stories”, Bart Welling considers petroleum as both a physical substance and a narrative. Oil, Welling argues, is an essential component of the “myth of energy” that has allowed humans to escape their origins in the animal kingdom and build for themselves worlds of comfort and prosperity that disregard the laws of nature. To understand this myth and, by extension, to better understand our relationship with the physical substance of oil and the industry built upon it, he proposes a “petronarratology”, or a mode of reading attuned to the myth of energy’s presence in the plots, characters and storyworlds of today’s narratives—even those that, on their surface, appear to have nothing to do with oil. As an alternative to this destructive myth, Welling advocates for bioregional narratives that root characters, plots and storyworlds in specific environments. He suggests that the second-person address and heteroglossia are particularly effective strategies for representing the environment in such texts.

The final pair of essays in this special issue focus on issues of perception and narration. In “Landscape Metaphysics: Narrative Architecture and the Focalisation of the Environment”, Taylor A. Eggan works against a tendency in ecocriticism to perceive landscape as “bad” or imperialist and environment as essentially “good” or indigenous. Eggan draws on the concept of focalisation, or the position by which readers “see” the events of a narrative, to destabilise this binary. He argues that because all storyworlds are framed and mediated representations of the world—all storyworlds are focalised through some perceiving agent, in other words—landscape description reveals more about how a narrative organises a particular worldview than it does about the natural world that it represents. His analysis of focalisation in Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House offers ecocritics a model by which to study the ideological and aesthetic concerns of landscape description. David Rodriguez’s essay, “Narratorhood in the Anthropocene: Strange Stranger as Narrator-Figure in The Road and Here”, asks how the philosophical writing of Timothy Morton, so influential on much recent ecocritical scholarship, challenges fundamental assumptions about the necessary humanness of narrators made by most narrative scholars. Rodriguez draws on Morton’s argument that environments are made up of “strange strangers”, or organisms that have co-evolved to exist together in interconnected ecosystems to the extent that they cannot be separated as autonomous individuals, to radically rethink narration in this moment of environmental crisis. He argues for an ethic of de-anthropomorphised reading that resists the assumption that narrators must be human, instead drawing his readers’ attention to texts such as Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road and Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here that forgo clear narrating agents in favour of spatial juxtaposition and description.

Clearly, ecocriticism has continued to branch out since Bracke and Corporaal’s co-edited issue. Clearly, too, these six essays begin to suggest rather than exhaust ecocriticism’s possible connections with narrative theory. From these things that are clear, readers of English Studies might extrapolate one thing further: a sense of urgency in analysing the stories that circulate about environmental conditions or relationships. Because so many of these stories will be told (or translated or illustrated) into/from/alongside English, this journal presents a timely venue for thinking through these and related questions and concerns. We look forward to reading the work that continues such conversations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Bracke and Corporaal, 709.

2 Ibid.

3 Glotfelty, xviii.

4 Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 11.

5 DeLoughrey and Handley, 14. See Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism. For discussion of ecocriticism's third wave, see Adamson and Slovic, “The Shoulders We Stand On.”

6 Arguably, DeLoughrey and Handley's criticism partly involves a slide from ecocriticism as a subfield of specifically literary and cultural studies to environmentally minded critique generally. They “recognize the need for field synopses and do not advocate drawing a hard line between environmental and ecocritical methodologies because they have developed in conversation and reflect intrinsically hybrid discourses” (15). The point is well observed, but it simultaneously suggests that others have perhaps drawn this line for provisional and pragmatic reasons.

7 Buell draws from ecocentrism as across disciplines with emphasis on Timothy O’Riordan's definition, which espouses an ethics of scale, responsibility and humility. In Buell and other sources including contemporary philosophy, the term often gestures toward an ethical reorientation that decentres the human (Buell, Environmental Imagination, 425).

8 Ibid., 145.

9 Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 241–2.

10 Heise, Sense of Place, 21, 22.

11 Heise, “Afterword,” 258.

12 Easterlin, 96.

13 Ibid., 139.

14 See Joseph Meeker's “The Comic Mode” on comedy, Terry Gifford's various publications on the pastoral, Greg Garrard's Ecocriticism for discussions about the pastoral and georgic, the first chapter of Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor for a proposed eco-picaresque, Eric C. Otto's Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism, and Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway's co-edited volume Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human.

15 Nolan, 88.

16 Knickerbocker, 4.

17 Lehtimäki, 119.

18 Ibid., 137.

19 James, xv.

20 Ibid.

21 Prince quoted in Warhol, 220; ibid., 21.

22 Iovino and Oppermann, 6, 7 (original emphasis).

23 Ibid., 9.

24 Slovic, 35, 34.

25 Iovino, 106.

26 Wildcat, 73.

27 See also Herman, “Storyworld/Umwelt”; and Keen, “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy.”