Seminar: Ecocriticism and Narrative Ethics
Leaders: Greg Garrard, University of British Columbia, and Eric Morel, University of Washington
Meets on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 23
Amid current efforts to bring ecocriticism and narrative scholarship together, narrative ethics is emerging as a promising area of potential overlap. Ecocriticism, after all, has strong ethical commitments, which resonate in foundational primary works by Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as much as in critical scholarship, where the successive “waves” have often sought to extend and diversify ethical considerations. The major strands of contemporary theory and activism, including ecofeminism and postcolonial ecocriticism, are as much moral as political. Moreover, while considerations of literary form have been prominent in ecopoetics from the outset, ecocritical treatments of narrative have tended, with a few notable exceptions, to prioritize nature-orientated content over narrative technique.
Meanwhile, narrative theory continues to explore the nature, scope and implications of the moral emotions invested in, and aroused by, stories. In particular, this workshop takes inspiration from the leading scholar of narrative ethics, James Phelan, whose pioneering analyses emphasize the ‘ethics of telling’: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrative-ethics. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively on ethical evaluation of a narrative’s characters and their actions (1) or moral judgments about the author’s supposed sins of omission (3), we follow Phelan in inviting scholars to reflect on the ethical dimensions of relationships between narrators and audiences at various textual levels (2). Our proposed workshop is motivated, in particular, by the belief that ecocriticism would be enriched by closer attention to what Phelan calls ‘the ethical dimensions of the narrative’s techniques’.
The seminar will be divided into four parts:
Greg Garrard is Associate Professor (Sustainability) at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Ecocriticism (2004; 2011), the editor of Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies and The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, and co-editor of the journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. In 2006, he was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in recognition of his contributions to pedagogy. Despite his broad knowledge of environmental criticism, he is a newcomer to narrative ethics who is looking to learn as much as to teach.
Eric Morel is a graduate student and teaching assistant (English) at the University of Washington (Seattle). He and Erin James (University of Idaho) recently distributed a Call for Submissions for a co-edited book project on intersections between ecocriticism and narrative theory after co-organizing two related panels at ASLE 2013 and ISSN 2014.
Readings:
Meets on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 23
Amid current efforts to bring ecocriticism and narrative scholarship together, narrative ethics is emerging as a promising area of potential overlap. Ecocriticism, after all, has strong ethical commitments, which resonate in foundational primary works by Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as much as in critical scholarship, where the successive “waves” have often sought to extend and diversify ethical considerations. The major strands of contemporary theory and activism, including ecofeminism and postcolonial ecocriticism, are as much moral as political. Moreover, while considerations of literary form have been prominent in ecopoetics from the outset, ecocritical treatments of narrative have tended, with a few notable exceptions, to prioritize nature-orientated content over narrative technique.
Meanwhile, narrative theory continues to explore the nature, scope and implications of the moral emotions invested in, and aroused by, stories. In particular, this workshop takes inspiration from the leading scholar of narrative ethics, James Phelan, whose pioneering analyses emphasize the ‘ethics of telling’: http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrative-ethics. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively on ethical evaluation of a narrative’s characters and their actions (1) or moral judgments about the author’s supposed sins of omission (3), we follow Phelan in inviting scholars to reflect on the ethical dimensions of relationships between narrators and audiences at various textual levels (2). Our proposed workshop is motivated, in particular, by the belief that ecocriticism would be enriched by closer attention to what Phelan calls ‘the ethical dimensions of the narrative’s techniques’.
The seminar will be divided into four parts:
- Starter (15 mins): a brainstorming session involving Antonya Nelson’s microfiction ‘Land’s End’ that will engage participants and introduce the objectives of the session.
- Introductory Remarks (30 mins): an outline how the major claims of narrative ethics relate to existing approaches in environmental criticism.
- Plenary Discussion (1¼ hours): a discussion of key texts in narrative ethics, using a pyramid technique to evince a consensus about the readings most relevant to the participants.
- Ecocritical Narrative Ethics in Practice (2 hours): participants are invited to apply narrative ethics to a story selected from I’m with the Bears (ed. Mark Martin), a popular collection of short environmental fictions.
Greg Garrard is Associate Professor (Sustainability) at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Ecocriticism (2004; 2011), the editor of Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies and The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, and co-editor of the journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism. In 2006, he was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in recognition of his contributions to pedagogy. Despite his broad knowledge of environmental criticism, he is a newcomer to narrative ethics who is looking to learn as much as to teach.
Eric Morel is a graduate student and teaching assistant (English) at the University of Washington (Seattle). He and Erin James (University of Idaho) recently distributed a Call for Submissions for a co-edited book project on intersections between ecocriticism and narrative theory after co-organizing two related panels at ASLE 2013 and ISSN 2014.
Readings:
- Booth, Wayne C. Introduction, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1989)
- Buell, Lawrence (1999). “Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 114, 7–19.
- Charon, Rita. “The Bioethics of Narrative Medicine,” from Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2008)
- Easterlin, Nancy. “Minding Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinders and Natural Places,” from A Biocultural Approach to Literary Theory and Interpretation (2012)
- Iovino, Serenella. “Restoring the Imagination of Place: Narrative Re-Inhabitation of the Po Valley,” from Lynch, Glotfelty, and Armbruster, The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place (2012)
- Lejano, Raul, Mrill Ingram, and Helen Ingram. “Introduction: The Stories Environmental Networks Tell Us” and “Narrating the Ethical Landscape of the Turtle Islands,” from The Power of Narrative in Environmental Networks (2013)
- Martin, Mark (ed). I’m with the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet (2011)
- Newton, Adam Zachary (2010). “Ethics.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Teaching Narrative Theory. New York: MLA, 266–80.
- Nussbaum, Martha. “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy” and “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,” from Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1992)
- Phelan, James. from Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (2008)
- Slovic and Satterfield. Interview with Gregory McNamee. from What’s Nature Worth?: Narrative Expressions of Environmental Values, (2004)
