Louise Westling

The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language

Introduction? 1. A Philosophy of Life? 2. Animal Kin? 3. Language Is Everywhere? Conclusion? Notes? Bibliography Index?

Literature and Ecology

The long tradition of pastoral and the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century have given critics plenty of experience in thinking about how literary works consider the human place in nature. What is new about ecocriticism is its implicit congruence with the sciences that tell us about Earth’s history, the relation of humans to other life forms, balances and disruptions in living systems. Dana Phillips charges that ecocritics, like too many environmental activists, have been motivated by naive ideas about harmony and holism. Indeed, he says that in spite of appeals to interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinary practice, ‘ecocriticism has been lamentably under-informed by science studies, philosophy of science, environmental history, and ecology’, subjects which professional responsibility ought to require us to know (Phillips 2003, pp. viii–ix). My object here will be to comment on the uneasy relations between literature and science, to discuss the ways writers and literary scholars have appealed to ecological concepts and to talk about how one might gain a working familiarity with ecological and evolutionary science. Then I shall illustrate how an ecocritical pedagogy can explore scientific and environmental emphases in contemporary literature.

Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf

Abstract This essay considers the impact of evolutionary biology on the concept of pastoral and surveys selected literary works from ancient to modern, to indicate the long history of anxiety about the relation of humans to other animals. Ecocriticism has been closely associated with literary pastoral since its beginnings but has come under criticism for this focus in the past few years. The pastoral has traditionally concerned itself with peaceful green spaces of natural purity where harassed urban dwellers retreat to restore themselves, but critics have exposed naiveté, escapism, and privilege at the heart of this literary mode. Such a dualistic, anthropocentric attitude toward the natural world is disastrously inaccurate in terms of evolutionary biologys demonstration of human enmeshment within the whole community of life on the planet. Maurice Merleau-Pontys concept of brute Being, embracing the philosophical implications of evolution, offers theoretical grounding for ecocritical analysis of literature that is congruent with the findings of evolutionary biology, ethology, and other life sciences.

Biosemiotics and culture: introduction

Do human linguistic capacities evolve from the use of signs in the rest of nature? Are literature, theatre, film and digital media extensions of the kinds of semiotic behaviours and sedimented memory found at every level of life from the simplest organisms to the most complex? This special issue of Green Letters results from a conference on Biosemiotics and Culture, held at the University of Oregon in May 2013, exploring these questions towards a radical new way of thinking. Five of the contributors are scientists (four Europeans and one American), and one is a philosopher (American) of European medieval and American modern semiotics. This is because biosemiotics developed out of a largely western and eastern European scientific milieu which then met with North American semioticians, Thomas A. Sebeok in particular, who had scientific interests. The editors, in turn, have long been convinced that environmental humanists must reengage ourselves with the sciences (despite the latter’s own metaphysical assumptions; Lewontin 1997), not only because of the general clarity of scientific thinking, but also, especially where the life sciences are concerned, to restore non-reductively our whole cultural experience to the biotic matrix from which it emerged. Reductionism in the modern sciences has made that move very difficult for humanities and arts scholars (although one or two have tried), but biosemiotics presents, precisely, a non-reductive, evolutionary semiotic systems approach to the sciences of living organisms (including humans). For too long, as Stephen J. Gould maintained (2003, 11–15), the estrangement of the ‘two cultures’ has been a debilitating caricature causing many humanists to retreat into defensive academic enclaves and scientists to assume that literary and philosophical research are not serious ways of exploring or characterising the world. Although Gould’s solution of non-overlapping magisteria is not satisfactory from the interdisciplinary perspective of biosemiotics, most of us know very well C.P. Snow’s (1959) ‘two cultures’ argument about the shameful ignorance of humanities (and by implication) arts scholars in regard to scientific matters. For those of us in the humanities who are especially drawn to ecological matters and their representation – whether centrally and consciously or marginally and symptomatically – in works of literature and art, or to the observation that similar patterns and movements appear in biological and cultural forms, the work of scientists in formulating the life sciences must remain of vital concern. When we pursue questions of biodiversity and its importance, the loss of species, climate change and ecological breakdown, it is from the sciences that we take our direction. In understanding evolution and biological systems development, it is from the sciences that we can start to think the interrelationships of organisms that have made them, including us, what we now are. Richard Kerridge tells us that ‘ecological crisis calls for deep changes of desire and behaviour in an impossibly short space of time’ (2012, 21), and surely a serious turn to the life sciences and earth sciences must constitute such a deep change. Yet as Dana Phillips charged, in spite of appeals to interdisciplinary practice, ‘ecocriticism has been lamentably under-informed by science studies, philosophy of science, environmental history, and ecology’ (2003, viii–ix). However, as noted above, the life sciences (including the cognitive sciences) have for too long remained under the dominant reductionist and Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 2015 Vol. 19, No. 3, 215–226, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2015.1078973

Deep History, Interspecies Coevolution, and the Eco-imaginary

The recent turn to deep history reveals an interrelational story of hominin emergence among myriad other living creatures, full of bodily intimacies, shared habitats, and interspecific cultural communications. This essay examines studies of coevolution, symbiosis, and mimicry expressing pervasive intersubjectivity that are increasingly acknowledged by biologists and biosemioticians. Traditional oral narratives, rituals, and early literary texts encode sedimented evolutionary histories of such relationships, preserving and continuing memories that are semiotic scaffoldings of cultural mimicry, mirroring and mapping the living world where our ancestors saw themselves in dynamic interrelation with the other animal species around them. These constitute an eco-imaginary expressing the human participation in coevolved animality that Merleau-Ponty saw as the logos of the sensible world.