Association
for the Study of Literature and Environment:
Reconciliation in Environmental Writing
Session Coordinator: Thomas K. Dean
Office of the President, The University of Iowa
101 Jessup Hall, Iowa City IA 52242
thomas-k-dean@uiowa.edu
Towards
a Culture of Life: Nostalgia and Reconciliation in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation
My paper examines Ruth Ozeki’s novel All Over Creation (2003) as an example of contemporary environmental writing that deploys nostalgia to advocate reconciliation between humans and nature. I argue that All Over Creation illustrates the importance of collectively shared affect—in this case, nostalgia—in fueling political action. Specifically, Ozeki promotes environmental and social justice by joining diverse (and unlikely) political agendas—a coalition of “young radical environmentalist[s]” and “old fundamentalist farmer[s]”—that unites around an ideal of reconciliation with nature (267). In contrast to today’s conservatives, I suggest that this novel envisions a new “culture of life,” consisting of a heterogeneous group of pro-lifers who share a conception of life that includes personal choice, compassion for others, and respect for diversity, along with a dedication to rectifying geopolitical inequalities.
In a world where everything is a double-click away—including even potential offspring—Ozeki suggests that nature, and makeshift communities formed in close relation to it, can become a corrective to the rootlessness, displacement and disconnection that foster alienation. What ultimately unites the book’s disparate characters in their critique of global capitalism is not a shared identity—not a religious affiliation, or a racial category, or a national allegiance—but a shared longing, for socially just communities that have not yet been realized. All Over Creation exemplifies the complex ways in which “longing can make us more empathetic” toward different kinds of people without necessarily adopting a homogenous identity.
A respectful, sustainable understanding of nature provides the common ground on which socially just communities might be founded. Ultimately, the novel’s nostalgic longing points to a particular site of reconciliation: a nonviolent, nonhierarchical community that values human and environmental “life,” yet recognizes the contingency of such life as lived within a global political order. While this site of reconciliation is itself an ideal, Ozeki suggests that its creation remains a real possibility.
Jennifer K. Ladino
Lamentation
and Restoration: Reconciling with the
Loss of the Prairie in
Hamlin Garland’s Boy Life on the Prairie of 1894, a semi-autobiographical account of
pioneer Midwestern farm life in the 1870s, is often considered the first
substantial work of
Thomas K. Dean
The
thomas-k-dean@uiowa.edu
Here
and There: The Reconciliation of the Poetic Self with Non-human World in Chinese
Tang Dynasty Farewell Poems
Tang Dynasty (618-906AD) is commonly regarded by many literary critics as the period when regulated Chinese poetry reached its first peak. Landscape poetry and occasional poetry are the two important sub-genres of regulated poetry. The former term is loosely applied to all poems which involve landscape depiction; while the latter refers to poems written on or for special occasions such as parties or performances. In this paper, I intend to study the reconciliation of the poetic self with non-human world in those farewell poems in this period which as a kind of occasional poetry employ mainly landscape depiction to achieve poetic self expression.
In these poems, the word “reconciliation” has three layers of meaning. First, it refers to the reconciliation of the poetic self with the physical world. In a farewell poem, the reader usually finds two places and two times: the place of here and there; the time of the present and the future. Landscape depiction in such a poem indicates that the farewell often takes place outdoors, usually by a river or a road. Nevertheless, most poets are not content with the depiction of the physical world “now.” Instead they also describe landscape which they imagine that their addressees might encounter either in their way or at their destinations. By depicting the two landscapes, the poet negotiates his (the poet is almost exclusively male) painful separation with his friend due to the physical distance with an added dimension of an imagined landscape where the writing self is still at present and in control. Therefore in this sense, reconciliation in such a farewell poem also means the restoration of the harmony between the physical world and the poetic imagination. Thirdly, reconciliation in these poems is never unilateral. Instead it also means nature functioning as the medium so that harmony can be achieved not only between the poetic self and the non-human world, but more importantly, between the male addresser and addressee, a bond which is essential to the patriarchal homosociety.
Beside the exploration of the different layers of the word “reconciliation,” I will also address the two questions of 1) how the characteristics of the natural images and the unique poetic form of regulated poetry impact the reconciliation; and 2) how the identities of both the addresser and the addressee are constructed through the reconciliation.
Haihong Yang
The
haihong-yang@uiowa.edu
Justifying the Primodial Passion: A Comparative
Emanating from a
consciousness thoroughly overawed by the innovation of industrialization and unfortunately blind to
its prize tag, many in the 20th
century were wont to question the grounds of Romantic poetic expression
to the extreme of a reductionist
skepticism commonly expressed in its
description as “ a mere nature poetry”(W.J. Keith 1980) ; but at the threshold
of the 21st century ,even
pathological skeptics became reconciled to the fact of the ageless
relevance of such literary commitment; what with the depletion of the ozone
layer, the hydra-headed challenge of pollution and the ultimate ecological
crisis occasioned by industrialization and multinationalism with the attendant
power of compressing time and space in their operation which is characterized by a concomitant
elimination of the Wordsworthian “pretty
scenery” in the age of globalization. As a comparative study, this paper seeks
to explore the unity of passion for environment and nature in the poetry of
Wordsworth and Ifowodo.This it hopes to do by highlighting on the one hand
the defining optimism and celebration which
radiates through Wordsworth’s “ . . . Tintern Abbey” in relation to the beauty
and inspiration of nature, and its capacity for the animation and facilitation
of existence, which elsewhere informed such prophetic persuasion as “youthful
poets …will be my second self when I am gone.” On the other, by focusing mainly
on Ifowodo’s The Oil Lamp (2005), it
will explore the preoccupation of this
“youthful poet” with the unfortunate passage of the celebration to that
of a forlorn lamentation of the depletion of contemporary ecology in which man
is ultimately and fatally a collateral damage; this ramifying in an immediate
sense Nigeria’s oil-producing Niger Delta’s recent history in which
multinational industrialization and its interfering influence on the politics
of pacification raises more questions about globalization than the conceptual
agenda answers at the moment.
Senayon Olaoluwa
University of the
Witwatersrand,