Here's my review. In about 800 words.
As discussions about “place” gain momentum in English studies, a small but growing number of composition instructors have begun to assemble around the idea of “ecocomposition.” Two very visible and influential figures in the field, Sidney Dobrin and Christian Weisser, have written a slim book, Natural Discourses: Toward Ecocomposition, that attempts to articulate the concerns of the field. If you take nothing else away from Dobrin and Weisser, you should at least take away that they believe that any composition class—ecocomposition or other—must be about composition, about student writing, about teaching writing. They take a good half dozen other writers to task for emphasizing reading or criticism over student writing. Because ecocomposition is a young field—maybe ten years, by name—the authors work hard to underscore what it does. But more importantly, they describe the new projects, the new understandings, that make this practice important and necessary. First among their ideas is that nature is a pre-existing force on everything that has happened, is happening, will ever happen. Relatedly, they argue that ecocomposition is about context in the most profound and varied sense(s) possible. They make clear that “place” is nuanced and changing. Place is physical, but also cultural, intellectual and historical. Lastly, they see ecocomposition as a practice that continues and extends a variety of progressive composition classroom strategies and/or ideologies. Ecocomposition, as they envision it, is interdisciplinary and activist.
They offer two general approaches to the ecompositional classroom, but have very little else in the way of classroom practices. Instead, this is a book that builds a theoretical underpinning that should suggest appropriate practices. Of the classroom practices, they first discuss the “ecological literacy approach.” This has four key aspects. First, place and setting are emphasized (including non-natural places). Second, they call for multiple perspectives and disciplines, including contrary voices, in the classroom. Their third point is fairly traditional for composition: have an audience for the writing projects beyond the classroom, though they argue for understanding internet and web places as public. Lastly, in the manner of Freire, they believe that ecomposition students should be asked to be critical of their environments and should consider how their work affects that environment.
The second illustration they offer is the “ecological discourse approach,” the practice they seem to favor. Here, they ask for instructors to challenge their students to see their writing as being situated in complex, ecological relationships to their environment(s). First, this approach stresses the reciprocal position of writer and writing to each other and to the world “out there.” Second, they argue for the importance of understanding language itself as situated. They mean here that it is situated in culture and place as well as situated within sentences that are in turn situated in paragraphs, and so on. Third, they again stress that writing starts in a place. That is, before writing can be individual, can even be formed by an individual, writing is already out in the world. Thus, the ecological discourse approach will situate students in discourse. They add, later, that discourse, too, begins in place.
Dobrin and Weisser turn their attention briefly, in the final chapter, to issues surrounding rhetoric. There’s a bit of facile, verging on specious, discussion of Aristotle as an ur-eco-rhetor. They read his broad interest in natural phenomena as well as his similarly broad interest in human culture as evidence that he was a systems thinker. Natural philosophy being what it was, however, you’d be hard pressed to find any thinker who didn’t have interests as broad. More intriguing is Dobrin and Weisser’s work to reclaim the rhetorical effectiveness of pathos. They argue that emotion is an evolved response and that it develops in each person in discourse with their culture. Thus, emotion—like reason and language—should be respected in discourse. That emotion is not respected they track back, rightly, to Western cultural prejudices, and, while I applaud them, I fear that they’ve taken on a project much too large.
Natural Discourses is fairly bracing and exciting, but it spins its wheels in places. It could have been better organized, perhaps with more chapters. As it is, it reads as if it needs a bit of editing. I would have liked to have seen more examples of the ecocomposition classroom. They could have used that space to work through some difficult issues about urban environments, race, class and gender. It’s not that they ignore these issues, but their discussions are cursory, particularly compared to their critiques of other essays that have been labeled as being about ecocomposition (their universal critique: too much about reading, not enough about writing). The most generous reading is that much remains to be done when it comes to the teaching of ecocomposition, particularly when envisioned by these two early theorists and practitioners.
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