Critical Ecologies: Crossing Over into New Disciplinary Territories

Talk by Joseph Tabbi (USA)
Lekcija: 01.10.09.

This talk presumes that global ecologies are in a state of crisis – that’s one meaning of the title that Cary Wolfe and I drafted in 1997 for a ‘thread’ in the online journal www.electronicbookreview.com. I am far from the first literary scholar to have engaged this problem. I do, however, feel as if the crisis has not been addressed adequately or consistently in scholarship, with an eye not only to the natural world and its representation, but also to the forms of critical analysis that we apply, perhaps too readily, from cultural and literary studies to the investigation of natural ecologies.

The second meaning of my title is that criticism itself needs to be more ecological, and perhaps less cultural and ideological than it has been. I am not an authority on ecological science, and I am not an ecological activist. I am one professor, teaching in a traditional literary program and traveling among scholars who seek alternative, perhaps para-institutional organizations and consequential discussions across literary and scientific disciplines. I’m not sympathetic to arguments that ecological problems will be solved by the development of new technologies or the discovery of new ideas. It’s rather late for that – and the valuation and institutional support of ‘the new’ may be part of the problem, not the solution to our headlong exhaustion of resources and depletion of species and plant diversity. I recognize how the pace of ecological destruction is hastened by the need for excess production and material dispossession in new liberal economies under development worldwide. This situation is not particularly well addressed by current forms of ideological critique. The reformation of critical discourse, a renewal of ecological thinking in discourse and across disciplines, is the primary topic of this discussion.

Joseph Tabbi is the author of two books of literary criticism, Cognitive Fictions (Minnesota, 2002) and Postmodern Sublime (Cornell, 1995). He edits ebr (www.electronicbookreview.com) and is co-director of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts EU meeting in Riga in 2010. He is professor of literature at the University of Illinois, Chicago and co-founder of the e-text+textiles Residency.