Patrick D. Murphy

Rethinking the Relations of Nature, Culture and Agency

Beginning with a critique of the Enlightenment human/nature dualism, this essay argues for a new conception of human agency based on culturopoeia and an application of an ecofeminist dialogic method for analysing human-nature relationships, with the idea of volitional interdependence replacing ideas of free will and determinism. Further, it posits that we need to replace the alienational model of otherness based on a psychoanalytic model with a relational model of anotherness based on an ecological model, and concludes by encouraging attention to developing bioregional natured cultures in place of nation states and multinational corporations.

The Procession of Identity and Ecology in Contemporary Literature

Taking Ranjan Ghosh’s provocative remark that “The earth is more a process than an object” as my starting point, I want to discuss the ways in which some contemporary literature attempts to help readers realize this awareness through the thought experiments and experiential scenarios that they relate. It is important in this regard to consider how such aesthetic texts must necessarily be not only forward thinking in their concepts but also in their imagery. Plot, character, rhetoric, style, structure all necessarily have to be engaged in order to immerse the reader in a potential reality and a reality filled with potential. In like manner, plot itself must not be Aristotelian and while we may not want a work to end on a note of irresolution, neither can we afford a resolution that wraps it all up, so that readers may remain passive spectators and trust to the heroic actions of others or technological fixes to return the world to some false impression of a secure, static state of being, rather than the flux and instability of evolutionary and anthropogenic environmental changes, which may include sudden shifts, mutations, and alterations. One might think of these literary engagements as furnishing the study for performing the household by resolving static cling. “Household” places the emphasis on the activities and functions rather than the building as an object, while “performing” comes from the Latin root “to furnish.” “Resolve” means both “to solve” and “to remove,” as well as to make visible parts of an image, and to separate out constituents. As for my title, “procession” comes from the Latin procedere, to advance. But, an ecological advance should not be confused with either the capitalist or Marxist concept of progress, which is founded on illusions of unlimited expansion and assumes that past practices invariably become obsolete and must give way to new practices. In late capitalism and market socialism these new practices are driven by a faith in technological fixes and denials of resource scarcity and finite biospheric carrying capacity. It is both extremely difficult and urgently necessary to work against reification and discreteness in wielding English; participles and definitionally multiplicitous words can help with thinking processionally. In what follows, I will combine these concepts, practices, and behaviors to emphasize how contemporary environmental novels question

Reclaiming the Power: Robinson Jeffers's Verse Novels

Robinson Jeffers developed in the early 1920’s the accentual prosody and narrative structure of his long poems in direct response to the primacy of the novel and as a self-consciously crafted alternative to modernist poetry. As William Everson notes, “Jeffers emerged at the height of the Modernist triumph, but of its aesthetic tenets he utilized only one. . . . the Modernists insisted that poetry must assimilate the techniques developed in the refinement of contemporary prose style. I t was the chief break with the past that brought poetry up to date. Jeffers followed suit” (ix -x ). As he notes in the foreword to his Selected Poetry, Jeffers shares with Ezra Pound the desire to wrestle the reading public free of the enthrallment of prose fiction:

Introduction: Gary Snyder

This special issue had its origin in the ongoing work of Dr. Joan Qionglin Tan and her Center for Gary Snyder Studies housed at Hunan University, Changsha, China, which promotes analysis and translation of Snyder’s writings not only in China but also internationally. The essays themselves are a continuation of some of the keynote lectures given at the International Symposium on Ecopoetics, Ekphrasis, and Gary Snyder Studies, sponsored by the Center onNovember 12–15, 2015, and additional solicited essays. Dr. Tan was gracious enough to apply for a Fulbright specialist grant for me to visit in the spring of that year to lecture on ecocriticism and ecofeminism, and at that time we determined the structure and scope of the conference, drewup the initial announcement, and began the process of lining up speakers and participants. The conference drew a wide array of scholars fromChina and around the world. At the same time, Dr. Tan has been busy translating Snyder’s poetry and prose into Chinese. The contributors are an interesting assemblage of individuals who have taught andwritten about Snyder throughout their academic careers as well as newer students of Snyder. The essays we have written for this special issue treat the full range of Snyder’s poetry andprose right up to his latest poetry volume,This Present Moment, published in 2015. At the same time, they focus on hismonumental poetic achievement, the booklength sequenceMountains and RiversWithout End, his Buddhist practice, and his environmental activism. For those not already familiar with Gary Snyder, let me provide some brief background. Born in 1930 into the Great Depression, his family struggled economically when he was a child. He learned to domanual labor early in life and simultaneously developed a great attachment to outdoor activities. He began mountain climbing, for instance, as a teenager and continued to climb until quite recently, when his advanced age has proven a significant deterrent. Initially, pursuing anthropology as his chosen field of study, he worked on northwestern Native American myths. But after earning a BA, he found himself, while in graduate school studying linguistics, realizing that his vocation was that of a poet. Once he accepted that calling, he never looked back. At the same time, he became a practitioner of Zen Buddhism, which took him to Japan for several years in the 1950s and 1960s. Even as he shuttled back and forth between Japan and the United States and elsewhere in the world, he published poems and quickly became associated with the Beat movement and the San Francisco Renaissance. His first book of poems, Riprap, appeared in 1959. It is marked by an attention to physical work and spiritual meditation and includes poems from his years working as a fire lookout, a wiper on an oil tanker, and a student of Zen inKyoto. Later editions have his free translations from theChinese of the poemsofHan Shan (Cold Mountain), which he had published the previous year. Along the way, and increasingly later in life, he wrote essays, which he also collected into several volumes. They are discussed across the essays gathered here. He has won numerous awards, not only for his poetry but also for his international promotion of Buddhism. As was the case with many other Beats, Snyder has displayed a deep concern for environmental issues and has been active in a variety of conservation causes. In this respect, Leonard Scigaj has cogently argued that Snyder is not only an environmental writer, but produces an “ecopoetry,” joining the ranks of a select few contemporary authors. Scigaj distinguishes between environmental poems and ecological poems by stating that “Onemight define ecopoetry as poetry that persistently stresses human cooperation with nature conceived as a dynamic, interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems” (5). Further, he remarks that “Ecopoetry conveys a profound distrust of language severed from the ‘real’ world where it originated and to which its meanings refer” (7), which is an issue that Snyder addresses in various essays in

Complexity Integration, Ecocritical Analysis, and Gary Snyder Studies

In other words, to reduce is to distort. Yet to develop an argument or even just to think consciously with self-awareness about an event, phenomenon, or other actant in the world, we engage in reductionist practices to determine significant factors, to limit variables, and to focus attention. In “Good, Wild, Sacred,” Gary Snyder noted succinctly that “Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order” (The Practice 93). To apprehend such order, then, requires a continuous effort to appreciate complexity through our own complex syntheses of information, theories, and experience. The practice of literary criticism often works against complexity and toward reductionism. Critics choose examples that fit the argument and either ignore or discount other aspects of the text lying outside their purview. Through the selection of a particular theory (or theories) to orient analysis, critics reduce consideration to those elements that the theory foregrounds. Although unavoidable, often critics and theorists, myself included, of course, treat theories as comprehensive and adequate to the texts and the world they represent, even though they are, at best, only adequate for a specific task at hand. Even then, other critics will consider such an analysis inadequate, inaccurate, or incorrect. Intersectional analysis, developed within feminism, sought to counter various types of reductionism that ignored gender. And over time, additional categories beyond race, class, and gender have been added, because to focus only on those three was reductionist. Yet even with additional categories piled on top of the foundational three, intersectional analysis suffers from a tendency to maintain a hierarchy of categories as static rather than dynamic, as fixed rather than as transient, historical, contextual, and not universally cross-cultural. Although unavoidable, we can find ways to recognize our reductionist maneuvers and to expand continuously the range of theories, concepts, and variables that we take into account and make count as we develop a global ecocritical analysis. Complex literary works and the oeuvre of authors who are systemic thinkers are essential for that task. Snyder proves this point as an example par excellence from his undergraduate honors thesis published as He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village to his most recent prose and poetry, such as “After Bamiyan,” the haibun criticizing the Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist statues (Danger on Peaks 101–02), or his 2005 essay “Sustainability Means Winning Hearts and Minds” (Back on the Fire 97–98). Today we find ourselves in the process of developing a “global ecocritical analysis.” The expansion of societies and associations devoted to the study of literature, culture, and environment, such as the ones recently formed for Southeast Asian nations and Brazil, as well as the inclusion of the term “ecocriticism” itself in various social sciences, attest to that process. However, by that I do not mean

The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, vol. 2: 1928–1938 ed. by Tim Hunt (review)

and war are inextricably linked in statement and in images equal in simple human power to those in Pound’s “River Merchant’s Wife.” The plight is stated in another way in a “letter” from “The Famous Old M an” who writes to young friends that “. . . the light is low; / houses slide downhill as usual in the West” and that “Oil and sanity leak / out everywhere. This is how it is. Fog too.” Loving remembrance is a major chord in these poems, as in “At Pilar for K.” where “Somewhere near here long ago / two lives held hands and spoke / of love.” But today “only the fragrance speaks.” A short poem titled “You” ends with this stanza: