Hubert Zapf

Literary Ecology and the Ethics of Texts

Among the various “turns” in recent literary and cultural studies, the ecological turn and the ethical turn are perhaps the most conspicuous. They have both opened up promising new areas of transdisciplinary inquiry and are, in many ways, at the heart of current trends in the humanities. In my paper, I would like to look more closely at the relationship between ecology and ethics, with particular attention to the ways in which literature and literary studies can contribute in significant ways to that transdisciplinary dialogue. If one tried to point out some of the convergences and common tendencies within recent ecology and ethics, one could name the following: (1) Both of them newly focus on the relationship between text and life that has been reduced to only one pole in the pantextual and pansemiotic universe of postmodernism. (2) Both of them deal not only with facts but with values, that is, with a critical attitude to a given state of things and with the necessity to think beyond it and imagine possible alternatives. (3) For both of them, the relationship between culture and nature and thus between the natural sciences and the humanities seems to have special significance, even if they approach this relationship from different angles. (4) Both of them share the assumption of an interconnection between local and global issues and are, therefore, transcultural and transnational in orientation. At the same time, it is helpful to approach any such transdisciplinary dialogue from an awareness not only of the affinities, but also of the differences and indeed the tensions between the disciplines involved, which cannot simply be subsumed under each other’s premises. After all, ethics has been that discipline within traditional Western philosophy in which the opposition between culture and nature, human and nonhuman life provided the foundational terms and concepts. Human consciousness and conscience, the freedom of the will, the autonomy of the subject, the moral sense of good and evil, the hierarchy of values between the spiritual, intellectual, psychological, and physical spheres

Literature and Ecology: Introductory Remarks on a New Paradigm of Literary Studies

This special issue of Anglia covers a new direction within Anglo-American literary and cultural studies, which has come to the fore since the 1990s and has been known under the name of Ecocriticism or Literary Ecology. To some extent, this new research paradigm is related to postmodernism, but at the same time its assumptions are at odds with some long-cherished premises of postmodern theory. By entering a dialogue with ecology, literary studies deliberately turn their attention to the relationship of literature to nature and of the text to the extratextual world, which had been largely neglected or merely considered from an ideological aspect in recent cultural studies. To reflect on cultures relationship to nature was considered politically questionable and epistemologically naive in the pansemiotic universe of poststructuralism in which every apparent reference to nature was deciphered as a linguistic-cultural construct that served only to hide the sociopolitical interests and ideologies from which it originated. Yet while it is true that in the course of history, nature has frequently been misused as an ideological instrument and a vehicle of power and manipulation – such as for the justification of supposedly ‘natural’ hierarchies of gender, class, race, ethnicity and so forth – this makes it all the more necessary to explore, in appropriately informed and complex ways, the significance and possible meanings of the concept of ‘nature’ within the spheres of culture. It is the aim of ecologically inspired literary and cultural studies, as they are demonstrated in the essays of the present special issue, to focus on the interaction and interrelatedness of culture and nature without neglecting the inescapable linguistic and discursive mediatedness of that interrelationship.

American Literary History

The chapters of this section cover the five periods into which American literary history is usually divided: early American literature; the American Renaissance; realism/naturalism; modernism; and postmodern and contemporary American literature. Traditional literary historiography has situated the beginnings of American literature in the early seventeenth century, when the first English settlers arrived in Virginia and Massachusetts and wrote travel accounts, histories, and religious texts. As entry I.3.1 points out, however, the English were latecomers to American colonization, and if we look beyond national and language boundaries the beginnings of American literature can be dated back to 1492, when Columbus wrote his first letters about the new continent. More important still, there was a wide range of native cultures to whom the continent was not new at all. While our chapters focus on written literature, it must be kept in mind that Native American myths, legends, and chants were usually transmitted orally from generation to generation; they form a literary history of their own that dates back centuries before the Europeans arrived. The twentieth-century revival of Native American literature is covered in entry I.3.5.

Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

One of the most significant developments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has been the emergence of ecocriticism as a new transdisciplinary paradigm in literary and cultural studies. In a most general sense, ecocriticism represents a response of the humanities to the environmental crisis which modern civilization has brought about in its uncontrolled economic and technological expansionism. In addition to categories like class, race, gender, ethnicity, or sexuality, nature (together with related terms such as environment, place, earth, planet) has become a central category of cultural studies—albeit a strangely hybrid category located somewhere between world and text, realist concept and discursive construct.

Introducing Literary Studies

Literary studies is a discipline with a long history, during which it has been influenced by fields that we would no longer regard today as central to literary studies, chiefly by biblical exegesis. Hence, the question arises as to what we consider as literature—we instantly would include written imaginative texts such as novels, poems and plays, but what about song lyrics, rap or performance poetry? In the context of increasing interest in psychological and sociological texts, the term could also be extended to, for instance, essays, political speeches, magazines, or newspapers. Scholars have proposed competing notions of literature, and today we can differentiate between a narrower and a broader understanding of (literary) texts (the latter would include rap lyrics for instance). The chief quality that helps us distinguish literature from other text sorts is the question of its pragmatic use.

Literatur Kanadas Die Andere Nord Amerikanische Literatur

Am Anfang steht die Frage, wie man sich die ›andere nordamerikanische Literatur‹ vorstellen soll und wie sie darzustellen ist. Anders ist sie ohne Zweifel in ihren Texten, ihrer historischen Entwicklung, ihrem Selbstbild — anders aber auch, weil sie sich stets im Bewustsein des Andersseins entwickelt hat, im Bewustsein des Nicht-Amerikanischen, Noch-Nicht-Amerikanischen oder des ausdrucklich Gegen-Amerikanischen. Das Problem der Alteritat wird uns also beschaftigen mussen, ohne das es den Blick auf die autonome Eigenstandigkeit der kanadischen Literatur verstellen soll. Die hier angeschnittene Frage nach dem Verhaltnis zur amerikanischen Literatur gehort zu einem umfangreicheren Fragenkomplex: aus welchem Blickwinkel sollen wir die kanadische Literatur betrachten? Als Gegenstuck zur amerikanischen Literatur, als britisch gepragte Klientenliteratur, als Teilgebiet dessen, was man in jungster Zeit gern als ›neue Literaturen in englischer Sprache‹ bezeichnet, oder aber als eigenstandige Nationalliteratur?