Eco lit examines nature's meanings

Author: Grace Duggan

On a campus with its largest academic buildings - McCardell Bicentennial Hall and the Donald E. Axinn '51 Center for Literary and Cultural Sutides at Starr Library - almost diametrically opposed, the Environmental Studies program makes its physical and intellectual homes between the two, straddling the deeply ingrained divide between the sciences and the humanities. The interdisciplinary nature of the country's oldest environmental program at the undergraduate level allows students to incorporate interests from a variety of fields, including literature and the creative arts - but does it matter?

Every Environmental Studies (ES) major at Middlebury must take "Nature's Meanings," a 200-level class offered each semester that focuses on the evolution of American conceptions of nature. The approach toward the course varies from professor to professor; it is not necessarily a literature course. While both Don Mitchell, Lecturer in English and Film & Media Culture, and Assistant Professor of English & American Literatures Dan Brayton have taught "Nature's Meanings," so have Kathryn Morse and Rebecca Gould, associate professors of History and Religion, respectively. Mitchell, who has been teaching the course since 1994, views it as a unique component of Middlebury's ES major.

"It took me several years to realize it," said Mitchell, "but one of the unusual features of Middlebury's ES program is the more or less central role that it gives to the study of environmental literature, broadly understood."

Although students with a vested interest in environmental literature beyond "Nature's Meanings" can elect to focus in environmental nonfiction or literature - two of the 13 foci currently offered by the department - less than 10 percent of the over 100 declared ES majors or joint majors choose to do so. In general, students choosing one of the two foci tend to opt for environmental nonfiction rather than literature. Despite the discrepancy, Mitchell maintains that those in the field do not weight one genre over the other.

Said Mitchell, "I don't sense that there's any sort of 'hierarchy' within the ES community here that would privilege scientific/scholarly writing - or, indeed, any particular genre of writing - over any other. We've been very successful, in my opinion, at 'letting 1000 flowers bloom.'"

Speaking more broadly, Professor of English & American Literatures Alison Byerly, whose scholarly work has included examinations of landscape depictions in both canonical and non-canonical texts, noted that nonfiction has typically garnered more attention in the field. Brayton had a similar view of the divide between the two foci, noting that environmental nonfiction is where "the numbers tend to be, whereas the literature focus tends to be much less in demand."

The overall low number of students concentrating in these two areas receives considerable support from the ENAM department in that the recent trend among scholars has included a growing validation of environmentalism as a lens through which to look at contemporary as well as canonical literature. Brayton, who just last year was named the Assistant Professor of Environmental Literature, is one such scholar.

"There has definitely been a shift in literary study towards reconsidering fiction, poetry and drama and looking for environmental themes," said Brayton. "We're trying to teach a body of literature that can be called environmental straight out on the face of it … but what is also going on is a reconsideration of canonical English and American literature. How do we read canonical or non-canonical preexisting English and American literature from an environmental perspective? Do we rethink Shakespeare's "The Tempest" in light of our current environmental crisis? Is that intellectually legitimate? That would seem to be anachronistic, and yet many scholars are saying this is something we have to do."

"It is only over the last decade or two that the labels environmental or ecological or ecocritical have been applied to nature-centered writers or approaches," added Byerly. "The creation of courses that are cross-listed between ENAM and ES has provided an opportunity to look at writing about nature thematically, using cultural, political or scientific contexts as well as purely literary contexts."