River of Play

Cobwebs

I'd like to be posting more--and more substantial--things, but the real world is pressing more and more uncomfortably upon me. The next two weeks will see a ratcheting up of activity that makes me anxious for the cause of my comps, but there's nothing to be done. Teacher camp is next week. A series of meetings with new students, faculty, and related planning happens next week. And then my parents descend right as the semester begins. 

In all of this I was reading Dana Phillips and Glen Love, and I'm delighted by their engagement with science and literature. For a fun primer on the controversies and who says what about whom, you should go read up on the Sokal Hoax if you haven't already .

Also, judging by the lack of response to Wendy's name--and recognizing that there are only two readers out there (hello, Jenny!)--I'm going to announce that we're going with the "Wendelynne" spelling. We think it looks and sounds good. There are no pictures of that spelling, so you're seeing it first here.

But there are pictures of Cthulhu plushies. I'm ordering one for her tomorrow. And a stuffed Meeple. D can't be the only source of fun stuff. And maybe a D20 plushie, too. The girl's got to get her geek on. 

We're Being Watched

Lordy, the post-avant has found us. Which is sort of what Skinner's all about, but Josh Corey went to the Brussels conference and has these reactions. Interesting stuff. I hope they hang around. 

In other news, the Chronicle of Higher Ed published the following piece (we'll see how long it lasts) in their August 1, 2008 issue. It shows us that the evolutionary ecocrits are taking a hard line and might not be doing well because of it. And there's some wrong-headed stuff in there (I mean, trying to see if anyone believes in the death of the author? Please. Seems to be missing the point that we don't need an biography to read a piece, and this lack of historical awareness will condemn this critic to the dustbin faster than his supposed political enemies). Anyway, the cognitive stuff is interesting and well worth paying attention to. 

Snap into this slim jim quick!

 Darwin to the Rescue

A group of scholars thinks evolutionary science can reinvigorate

literary studies

By BRITT PETERSON

In the face of any looming apocalypse, imagined or not, prophets abound. For the literary academy, which has been imagining its own demise for almost as long as it has been around, prophets seem always to look to science, with its soothing specificity and concreteness. As the modern discipline of literary criticism was forming in the early 20th century, scholars concentrated their efforts on philology, a study that was thought to be more systematic than pure literary analysis. When the New Critics made their debut in the 1920s and 30s, their goal was to give a quasi-scientific rigor to literary theory: to lay out in detail the formal attributes of a "good poem" and provide guidance as to how exactly one discovered them. Later the Canadian critic Northrop Frye, in his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, famously queried: "What if criticism is a science as well as an art?" And some of the poststructuralist thought that began to filter into America from France in the 1960s took as its bedrock linguistic and psychoanalytic theory.

But very few pro-science activists suggested that literary scholars should actually work the way scientists do, using such methods as accumulating data and forming and testing hypotheses. Even Frye argued that, while the critic should understand the natural sciences, "he need waste no time in emulating their methods. I understand there is a Ph.D. thesis somewhere which displays a list of Hardy's novels in the order of the percentages of gloom they contain, but one does not feel that that sort of procedure should be encouraged." Over the last decade or so, however, a cadre of literary scholars has begun to encourage exactly that sort of procedure, and recently they have become very loud about it. The most prominent (at least in the nonacademic media) are the Literary Darwinists, whose work emphasizes the discovery of the evolutionary patterns of behavior within literary texts — the Iliad in terms of dominance and aggression, or Jane Austen in terms of mating rituals — and sets itself firmly against 30 years of what they see as anti-scientific literary theories like poststructuralism and Marxism. In the past few years, such critics have had the honor of a long, if quizzical, New York Times Magazine profile and, in May, a place on the Boston Globe's Ideas page, where Jonathan A. Gottschall, a leading proponent of Literary Darwinism and an adjunct English professor at Washington and Jefferson College, explained why the approach is for him, as he says, "the way and the light."

His comments have been receiving widespread attention in the blogosphere, perhaps because they touch a nerve: The idea that traditional literary studies are in decline, or already dead, is bandied about almost casually now. The symptoms are legion, from the discussion of books as an old technology to the tight job market and the increasing reliance on adjunct labor in the humanities. And, like Gottschall, many academics see literary theory as an alienating force that has driven students away from their disciplines, and splintered the disciplines to the point, sometimes, of outright war. Nonetheless, many literary scholars are skeptical of the idea that Literary Darwinism will save their sector of the academy. And some of the strongest criticism comes from those you might think would be allies — other members of the loosely defined group of literary critics breaking new ground with studies that incorporate scientific theory and even, in a few cases, empirical method. Literary Darwinists are "a very small group of people that position themselves as martyrs for the cause … because they expect to be berated by everyone else in the field," says Lisa Zunshine, an English professor at the University of Kentucky, who works with cognitive approaches to understanding literature. "But, in spite of the publicity that they're getting, I don't see that they're actually attracting so many people."

Literary Darwinists beg to differ. Gottschall's Globe article is a bracing manifesto, outlining the sad state of the literary academy and pointing to scientific method as the only life raft in sight.

"Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof," he writes. "The alternative is to let literary study keep withering away." He provides two demonstrations of his approach. The first is a study just published in the journal Human Nature, in which he collects accounts of beauty in fairy tales from around the world to test whether Western tales place an extraordinary importance on female beauty. The second is a comparison of reactions from "500 literary scholars and avid readers" to characters from 19th-century British novels to gauge whether the author is truly dead — in other words, whether the meaning of a text is derived primarily from each reader's particular experience, as cultural theory has had it.

The subjects of the two experiments are not accidental. Literary Darwinism conceives of itself as the primary opposition to cultural theory in all its forms: Marxism, poststructuralism, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, and so forth. In the Literary Darwinist mind-set, cultural theory — subjective, deliberately obtuse, politicized, based on outmoded assumptions — is the disease that's stricken the academy, and scientific rigor is the cure. "Most of the big ideas in literary theory have been tried out and rejected in other disciplines. So psychoanalysis has no life in psychology anymore — it only exists in the humanities. Marxism has no life really in political theory or in economics classrooms," Gottschall says. "My point is, we start with these bad theories, and work founded on faulty premises is going to be faulty itself." Of course, the tests he cites in his Globe article find both the feminist critique of the Western tradition as having a unique focus on beauty and the poststructuralist idea of the "death of the author" to be false. (Not all Literary Darwinists subscribe to Gottschall's reliance on qualitative study; others treat scientific ideas more as a theoretical frame for reading than as a guide to method.)

Literary Darwinism is also garnering attention because it joins evolutionary-minded scholarship in various fields. Scholars like Gottschall; Joseph Carroll, of the University of Missouri at St. Louis; and the Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd, of the University of Auckland, have found much common ground with evolutionary psychologists. The 2002 book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking), by Steven Pinker, an evolutionary and cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, reads like a companion piece to Gottschall's and Carroll's writings: "The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the 20th century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised people are staying away in droves?" In a review last year in Philosophy and Literature of the seminal Literary Darwinist anthology, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (Northwestern University Press, 2005), edited by Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, a biologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Pinker wrote that, despite several methodological concerns, he found the book "exciting." He added, "It isn't often that one can be present at the genesis of a new field of knowledge."

But Literary Darwinists have been far less welcomed by mainstream literary theorists. Referring to the theory of the unity of scientific and literary knowledge in E.O. Wilson's 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard, wrote in 2005 that humanities departments "should definitely not want consilience, which is a bargain with the devil." While scientists have criticized the methods Gottschall uses in his experiments as not very scientific, literary scholars have often claimed that the concerns of Literary Darwinism are less than literary. Natalia Cecire, a literary blogger and graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote an impassioned denunciation: "For a literary critic, Gottschall seems alarmingly unaware of what it is that we actually do." Taking issue with his finding that Western society is not alone in its sexism, she charged, "I challenge Gottschall to come up with some citations of 'scholars' (plural) who have said that. Not Naomi Wolf: actual literary critics." The Literary Darwinists expect and almost court that type of dismissal. The scholars tend to see themselves as outsiders: denied jobs at prestigious universities, tenured positions, and grant money because of the iconoclastic nature of their work. Gottschall is still an adjunct, and he says he believes that no one of a "principally Darwinian bent" has tenure, except for those who originally started down a more-traditional path. "It is true that we are promoting views that seem disturbingly alien or threatening to most of the professors who serve on hiring committees, editorial boards, and who comprise the main pool of peer reviewers," he says. Carroll says that he is "looking forward" to the day when he can just "get down and do the work," instead of being forced to constantly explain and defend his approach.

Still, both Gottschall and Carroll are sure that their ideas will eventually gain mainstream credibility. Carroll talks about Literary Darwinism's exerting a "carrot and stick" influence on the literary academy: "The stick is that [mainstream academics are] going to feel more beleaguered and provincial and left out in the cold, and the carrot is that they're going to feel that here's something new to do." Gottschall adds: "I think that ambitious young scholars, graduate students and so forth, will see something of glamour in here, something that can motivate their studies. And there will probably be resistance against it too, but again, I have confidence in the ideas, and I think they'll win out."

A less-expected attack, however, comes from similarly marginalized scholars who, like Kentucky's Zunshine, study related fields like cognitive theory and empirical literary research. Like the Literary Darwinists, such scholars, to varying degrees, work at the juncture of literary theory and scientific methods. Those who turn to cognitive theory fit into several different subfields, including literary critics who use empirical data, collaborating with neuroscientists and experimental psychologists to study the connections between brain function and reading. Some adherents, like Nancy Easterlin, of the University of New Orleans, draw both on cognitive theory and evolutionary psychology in their work. Easterlin works with a broad assortment of approaches, including Darwinist-based feminism and what she calls "cognitive ecocriticism." It is the pro-science literary scholars who don't use evolutionary psychology who tend to be the most skeptical that the Literary Darwinists will succeed in transforming literary studies forever.

For some of the literary scholars who use cognitive science, that is because their background incorporates cultural theory as well as science, and they're wary of junking 30 years of new thinking. F. Elizabeth Hart, an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut who has a background in Renaissance literature and an interest in how cognitive theory affects, for example, conceptions of metaphor, says she mistrusts an approach that so de-emphasizes the effect of culture on the individual. "We have to find a theory that creates or explains or allows for an interface between the individual as an agent and the — to use a Marxist phrase — superstructure that bears down on the individual. You have to have a model that accounts for both," she says. Zunshine accuses the Literary Darwinists of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater. … It's somewhat ridiculous to say that scientific method can help us to shed light on all of the questions that literary theory has been engaged with."

The Italian literary scholar Franco Moretti, now at Stanford University, isn't in the field of cognitive literary studies, but his work frequently gets lumped in with the empiricists because of its particularly scientific and mathematical nature. He has been writing about the connections between evolution and literary theory for many years. He reiterates in an e-mail message the argument that Literary Darwinism doesn't address literary form, that it's concerned with external issues that avoid literature's literary nature: "If Literary Darwinism manages to improve the way to understand and explain literary form, then it will be a great step forward, but if it eludes form, or just doesn't 'see' it, then it will mean exactly nothing." Joseph P. Tabbi, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies the intersections between cognitive theory and 20th-century literature, says of Gottschall's fairy-tales experiment: "If you're interested in questions of sexism, you need to look at more than expressions of stereotypes; you need to look at the way that the narrative is shaped; you need to look at questions of closure in narrative, questions of sequence, and questions that fall into the category of narratology. I'm not sure that by taking samples and doing statistical processing that you're going to get very far." D.T. Max, the author of the New York Times Magazine article, got at that objection when he wrote, "I don't think even by stretching one's imagination primates evoke 'The Waste Land' or 'Finnegan's Wake.' Tone, point of view, reliability of the narrator — these are literary tropes that often elude Literary Darwinists."

And still others attack the Literary Darwinists on the other flank, prying apart their scientific credentials. While some who call themselves Literary Darwinists do have a scientific background — and several scientists wrote articles for The Literary Animal, including E.O. Wilson — many in the group have no background in statistics or evolutionary biology, and they frequently work alone instead of in groups with scientists, unlike many of the cognitive theorists and empirical literary critics. (Carroll said that he recently gave himself "a crash course" in statistical analysis, but neither he nor Gottschall has any official training.) Alan Richardson, an English professor at Boston College who works with cognitive theory, writes in an e-mail message that the work he's seen from the evolutionary literary theorists "is riddled with basic errors in study design and methodology."

David Miall, a professor of English and film studies at the University of Alberta who teams up with a psychologist to perform empirical studies of reader response to texts, says that, with the Literary Darwinists, "what you've got is just another way of coming up with interpretations of texts, and I'm not sure we need that, so urgently … unless they really have something new to tell us about the nature of the text. And if there is something new, there should be a way of validating it empirically. So in that sense, their resistance to doing empirical studies seems to be a real disability. It's disappointing that they don't go to that next stage." Miall's recommendation would be to test empirically whether readers are actually influenced to think about the mating strategies and other evolutionary patterns that the Darwinists read into the works they examine.

Both Gottschall and Carroll are used to responding to such critiques and do so pre-emptively in most of their publications. In an upcoming issue of the journal Style, Carroll will take on some 30 scholars about various aspects of Literary Darwinism. As for the question of whether its approach can fully get at literary problems, Gottschall writes in his forthcoming book, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan): "I suspect that there will always be vital humanities questions that deflect every tool and device in science's organon. Moreover, I do not mean to hint that sound qualitative studies cannot help us generate more reliable knowledge."

Gottschall's essay in The Literary Animal also includes an extended defense of using quantitative methods for literary studies, alleging that, over the history of human knowledge, many fields (including medicine and sociology) have resisted the importation of statistical analysis: "Critically, the point is not that investigators in these fields eventually discovered that everything could be reduced to numbers after all. Rather, they came to realize that quantitative and qualitative tools were both utterly indispensable for a reasonably complete exploration of their fields, each set of tools being appropriate for different types of questions." (Despite that conciliatory stance in print, however, in person Gottschall often seems to be choking back a complete denunciation of traditional literary studies, saying qualifiedly, "I'm not quite calling for total disciplinary annihilation and genocide.")

The proponents of Literary Darwinism have also taken on the question of its scientific rigor. Carroll says, "A lot of people do say that, and one of the responses to it is that people who say that haven't read most of the stuff they're rejecting." Gottschall points out that much of his writing has been published in scientific journals. He admits, however, that under the name of Literary Darwinism "there's also a lot of crap. There really has been a lot of crap. Now the question is, what does that prove? Does it really prove that it's futile and jihadist and all of that? Or does it prove that we need to do a better job? Because you can also go out and find hugely depressing lists of problems in quantitative approaches."

As to whether Literary Darwinism will save literary criticism, opinions are split there too. Indeed, other scholars of scientific theory and empiricist research seem far less morbid on the subject than Gottschall and Carroll. Many see the numbers increasing in their own specialties; it's not unusual to hear stories about scholars in the field of cognitive theory and literary studies, for example, who have been laboring in isolation for decades now getting greater recognition from their colleagues, professional institutions, and academic publishers. For them the future looks far brighter than it seems for the evolutionary literary theorists, perhaps because the field of cognitive studies outside the literary sphere is so hot. Zunshine, in fact, sees Literary Darwinism as a force that could add to the joblessness and hopelessness of students and professors, instead of vice versa: "Say I am a professor of English, I have graduate students, and I tell them: You have to forget about everything that your colleagues have been working on for the last 30 years because it's all literary theory, it's all wrong, and now you have this new scientific approach that you use. Now let me ask you, what would happen if a graduate student who hears this goes on the job market?"

Even mainstream scholars who have proclaimed the end of literary studies are wary of the solution offered by Literary Darwinism. William Deresiewicz, a former associate professor of English at Yale University, wrote a gloomy article in The Nation that is frequently cited as evidence of the apocalypse by Gottschall. Deresiewicz says, "This is not to say that some of those methods can't be useful; I'm not going to make an a priori statement like that. But I worry that they proceed from a failure or an unwillingness to recognize or see that science and literature represent different areas of knowledge."

Andrew Delbanco, a professor of the humanities at Columbia University and author of the 1999 New York Review of Books article "The Decline and Fall of Literature," calls his attitude "cautiously open skepticism. The kind of reductionist stuff that I could imagine coming out of this would seem to me to be moving in exactly the wrong direction. But I don't think one should close one's mind to it."

For the Literary Darwinists, however, the urgency is so high that they see their work, whatever its flaws, as the literary academy's last, best hope — if, of course, it has the courage to embrace the inevitable. "We're desperate," says Gottschall. "The field is really, really desperate. Morale is so bad. No one really knows what to do. Everyone is saying what I am, in some way — they have the same critique, the same feeling that our old ways are just plain spent. "But when it comes down to how to solve these problems, how to win back relevance and consequence in the world, how to secure a place for the discipline in the future, people are pretty timid about these more aggressive solutions."

Britt Peterson is assistant managing editor of The New Republic.

________________________________________

http://chronicle.com

Section: The Chronicle Review

Volume 54, Issue 47, Page B7

The Ecopoetry Follow Up

First I want to give a congrats to my friend--and rare blog reader--Owen who not only landed on his feet jobs-wise recently but also went out and got himself engaged. 

And now, on to business...

I've become more interested in the ecology of culture, if you will. One of my frustrations with the nature poetry side of ecopoetry is the insistence on realism. You find this critique in Dana Phillips and Gilcrest, for example, who note that humans have developed fiction and trope and that these things help us get to different levels of understanding both our lives and the world around those lives. While I consider post-modernism to be mostly the last gasp of the high academic humanism, I think it would be the height of absurdity to insist that our writing be about the non-human world. So I'm interested in how writing can become an ecotone between culture (in a long, deep sense), nature, and the human experience. Which, like it or not, is the dominant experience on the planet. We might talk more about what it means to have this kind of power. Go google "anthropocene" if you wish to quibble. The stuff of culture as itself remains a little less interesting on its own merits. That is, the ceaseless intertextuality and infinite play of signs continues to feel like a shell game. But incorporating these aspects back into the larger whole... that starts to feel a bit more interesting. Though I still despair of ever caring too deeply about the politics of poetry. I wish I could get more excited about criticism. 

Last item. And this is political only inasmuch as there's voting. We're thinking about how to spell Wendy's full name, once she's here. We had thought about Wendolynne. But then we saw Wendeline (which is...OK). And we've moved to Wendelynne. What do you think?

Ecopoetry and the School of Quietude

I ran across this post (from well over a year ago, now) asking about the nature of New American ecopoetry. I read "New American" as friendly to the post-avant crowd, but I so rarely pay attention to poetry politics and career-shaping that I don't have any deeper speculation than that. The speculation there dovetails well with the discussion over on How2's current issue about ecopoetics. There seems to be a lot of hand-wringing about the perception that ecopoetry doesn't seem to want to embrace the post-avant, language, post-language, etc. version of poetry. Indeed, ecopoets seem--mostly--to be content with exploring the School of Quietude (Silliman's dismissive term for poets who reject the avant). 

Because I need to get to the business of other aspects of living, I'll drop this in: Language-y work participates far too much--and unreflectively so--in the culture of culture. By taking language as its sole referent, it becomes a monoculture. Therefore, it seems at best dull. 

Now, is there a lot of dull SoQ nature poetry out there? Oh, hell, yes. And I'm intrigued by Christopher Arigo's approach to cross-pollinations between what might be called mainstream poetry (whatever that means at this point) and the various avants and their work. 

(As an aside, the idea that ecocriticism is not up to the task of revealing new, interesting aspects to a poet's work, as the end of New American Poetry post--first link, above--suggests, seems strange to me. Unless what he's saying is that there's not a secret history to be recovered, in which case I'm with him. But to explore new aspects of work and discuss their implications seems the work of critics.)

On the Subject of Mucosa

I will say this: there is a lot of that stuff in the head. And yours is disgusting. We're onto a second round of disgustingness this morning. My period of extreme buggers is just about over, but D's is beginning. Send her dry thoughts, won't you?

And if you feel further moved to send something--spring pledge drive is underway, of course--send enough money to send me here. I'll be glad you did.

(PS: I have got to get to that the next time they have it...Swear to god.)

Running to Stay in Place

The pace of life at the office and home are simply breathtaking. And sleep-inducing. I crashed in the single digits last night. Got up, and pretty much ready to crash again. Wall-to-wall office work--and the mere prospect of it--can sap the life out o' ya. I suppose there's an end in sight. Signal back to me if you get there.

What has been good, though, are the books about the Nebraska and Lincoln I've dug out of the library (pretty easy to do in the capital city). Looking at photos and reading descriptions of the town as it developed gives the walk--and a way into the poems--a different light. If you will; I'm rushing this post. Books on geology and ecology keep extending the ideas and making my engagement with this place just...better. It's hard to explain. So go do research on your own part of the world and get back to me. It'll be fun. I promise.

The Project

As I get the comps reading done (finally, entirely finished with one list and only three books to go), and in the midst of the MMLA revision process, an idea for the dissertation has leapt into my ragged head: my walk to work.

It goes like this: if I'm struggling toward ecopoetry, and I'm convinced that place and placedness is part of the process and product, then I should take on my place a little more deeply. When thinking about how to narrow down the entire Great Plains, I began to think about what I know most intimately. That would be my walk to and from campus. Twice a day. Every day. Five days a week. I pass some of the oldest houses in the city as well as the place where the first cabin was built. I pass the capital building and the offices of the state government. I work at the largest university in the state. And I walk past and around all of this in rain, snow and clear days. Before dawn and after sundown. In wind and in fog. I see seasons pass--including the mating and migration seasons. Plants sprout, bud out--volunteers, wild and cultivated--they bloom, go to seed, dry up and turn to compost.

Right. So I've been hitting the stacks for history and science books.

But first, the MMLA.

The Counter Rant

I’ve been fascinated recently by Dan Barden’s workshop rant in Poets & Writers. He thinks the workshop is broken, mostly, if I can read it right, because it doesn’t a) let young writers know that no one needs to read their work, and b) it doesn’t have enough terror in it. It’s a kind of gruff, fisticuffs-filled, tough-love approach to the workshop. Fair enough. Some people might like that sort of thing. Great.

But I think he’s wrong pretty much everywhere, except where he says that the workshop should help writers change their understanding of and relationship to their writing. There’s a lot to tackle, so I’m just going to hit some high points.

He’s a big one for desire and conflict, but I’m not sure what it means to write something that someone needs to read. Accounting reports? National defense white pages? But need to read short stories or poems? Hell, people don’t really need to read anything, an issue that has the NEA wringing its hands again. So while he denigrates the verb “to want,” it’s the one that applies to creative writing; we hope to make something that someone wants to read. I realize that I’m hashing out semantics, but I think they’re important. On the other hand, if what he’s trying to say is that students need to understand the rhetorical context within which they’re working—that they need to understand that an audience isn’t built into anything they write—, then I’m with him.

I’m not sure what he means by terror. And he doesn’t offer any practical advice, or theoretical framework—it is a rant, after all—, but it leaves the topic hanging. Being scared shitless seems to work for him, he suggests. I’m not sure it works for many others. Or anybody. And I’m not sure he’s not lying to us.

So, the best question is: what IS the point of the workshop? If the point is to manufacture professional writers who want to become masochists who live in fear, then I think that Barden’s on to something. But how many undergraduates really believe that they’re going to be writers? For my school, the workshop is a writing credit, so we get a lot of engineers, history majors, exercise physiology majors—whatever. Are they best served by terror?

The workshop, even at the graduate level, is almost entirely populated by people who will never go on to publish.

We might say, they don’t need the class. They don’t need our work.

But like a magazine at a doctor’s office, they’ve picked it up anyway. If we’re lucky, they might go out and by another magazine. They’ll go out the door of our class understanding what’s at stake in writing. They’ll understand that it’s hard work, and they’ll appreciate a story, a book, a poem, a play, a movie that much more. And maybe they won’t fear literature.

Does this mean that I don’t ask my students to work in my class? That I let any damn thing they say to be acceptable? Not at all. And though I never have any discussions about why my degree makes me the chest-beating master of my class, my students respect my expertise. Of course, we let a lot of other masters into the class: my students do a lot of research and reading. We talk about how other texts work, and then we take that back to the workshop. And we make sure to use the strategies and vocabulary from our craft and literature discussions. Do they write a whole shit-ton of poetry? Maybe not so much. But they walk away with a sense that this work of writing is hard. It’s hard to do, hard to think about, hard to judge. But engaging with it is profoundly satisfying.

(And after this, I'll try to post a poem or two...but I've been spending so much energy on the comps and the various presentations that I haven't had a chance to do much poetizing. It is to make one sigh dramatically and call for more coffee.)

Less Than One Thousand Miles

I'll be heading to Albuquerque early Tuesday morning. The SW/TX Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association will be hosting 1,200 of us at the Hyatt hard by the Civic Plaza. You can find me and my panelists at the Enchantment F room, 2:15-3:45, section 136: Eco-Criticism and the Environment. But if you can't make it, I'll give you this to read.

Sit back. It might take a while.

Writing the Place You Know

When I was first teaching composition and taking poetry workshops, I was struck by how similar the core format was: close attention to student texts as well as reading and critical engagement with expert texts. But the composition classes I was teaching seemed far more interesting pedagogically then the workshops I was taking. The students were asked to range far and freely in topics and interests; we kept coming back to their texts as they worked on revision; they were encouraged to see how their texts connected to other parts of their academic and non-academic lives. Workshops and readings were designed to challenge assumptions and habits. It was hard, and it was fun.
You can imagine my delight, then when given an opportunity to teach a class in my own field, creative writing. If comp was fun, then I expected poetry to be a blast. But after going through a scholarly MFA program and moving on to a PhD program, I knew that I didn’t want a poetry class that merely recapitulated the lore and recipes that I had received in my early poetry workshops. I had become convinced that creative writing classes are excellent sites for critical engagement and for extending critical thinking and writing skills—I can read my previous description of the composition classroom as a description of the creative writing classroom as well for the most part—but creative writing classes seem to be rarely acknowledged as places for critical inquiry. This avoidance of the critical work that can go on is in part a continuation of the Romantic notion that poets are born as rare geniuses who have everything they need to be poets but an understanding of craft (and I will go ahead and include other kinds of creative writing classes here, though my training is as a poet). That we’re special geniuses is a comforting thought for successful writers, I suppose, but it erases almost the entirety of human experience and history. So when I started to teach undergraduate poetry classes, I looked to people like Wendy Bishop and Katherine Haake, some of the relatively few thinkers engaged with creative writing pedagogy that looks beyond the classroom to larger conversations and engagements. Recently, I’ve begun to look further afield, to the exciting and important new field of ecocomposition to inform my creative writing pedagogy.
I will be using the work of ecocompositionists and creative writing theorists—and the category of place—to suggest pedagogical strategies and practices for an ecologically engaged undergraduate creative writing class. These practices are central to engaged pedagogy, to successful writing, and to developing a sustainable future.
First, a little bit about ecocomposition and engaged pedagogy: Eric Otto argues that ecocomposition is a furthering of post-process composition theory in that ecocomposition extends the interest in “non-codifiable, social dimensions of written discourse” to examine the “relationship between writers and their surroundings.” Sidney Dobrin and Christian Weisser, two of the most visible proponents of ecocomposition, add writing and place to identity inquiry in order to explore the “role of place and identity in writing.” They stress that ecological texts might be used, but they should not overwhelm the primary concern of student’s writing. It is in fact a central concern of many theorists that although questions of environmentalism and sustainability (at least) are politically charged, that the classroom not be turned over to proselytizing. Greta Gaard, for example, writes that her ecocomposition classroom allowed for diverse opinions while supporting student insights and improved writing.
Thus, as the theorists have it, ecocomposition reaches outside the classroom, and encourages seeing the classroom connected to other issues and the literal world as well as capital-N Nature and urban nature. Connecting student writing in the creative writing classroom is exactly what Katharine Haake and Wendy Bishop argue for. Haake in particular warns us to remember that students aren't copies of ourselves. She notes that creative writing is a kind of making, but one that occupies a privileged position in culture and the academy. For that reason, we must, as teachers create spaces for everyone to speak, to open access to that privilege—a difficult task, she recognizes. In any classroom, silence can be easily imposed—and this is a particular pitfall of the older workshop model—but it is breakable. Haake links this to the vexed question of responding to student work. She suggest that even, perhaps especially, the place for student voice is in the evaluation process. [and I was happy to note that there are papers on this topic—evaluation in the creative writing classroom—going on at this conference]
Of course, the time and attention it takes to negotiate the classroom carefully means that it becomes easy, given the demands of an academic career, to ignore teaching. Mostly, our advancement lies outside the classroom, in publishing, conference presentations, service and so on. As writers, the temptation is great simply to rely on the Romantic genius model, to use the lore and recipes we received from our own classroom experiences, and then appear in the classroom with a minimum of preparation. But we signed on as professors, not insurance executives, doctors or lawyers. We need to pay attention to our pedagogy. And engaged pedagogy matters because we are authority as well as a model of authority. We are expert, and the model of the expert. We are keepers of the topic and reveal the concerns and practices of the topic. We must interrogate and consider our practices, and by seeing ourselves in a complicated, ecological web with our students, our department, our college and/or university, our campus, our bioregion and so on we will become better teachers, as well as practitioners of our art (and this feeding back into artistic practice is something I rarely see taken up—I hope someone will, and I hope they come talk to me about it). While the demands of engaged pedagogy are high, the self-reflexive nature of the work can and should feed back into our own practices—perhaps even more for creative writers than for compositionists.
I want to touch on the category of place for a moment. Place allows for engaged, even radical, pedagogy. Arlene Plevin argues that place expands and decenters the classroom, it reveals how important choices in class have repercussions in the real world out there. She argues that critical thinking skills will reveal students own placement and wants to include the non-human world as part of critical consciousness. Similarly, Colleen Connolly argues that diversity should include Nature in critical awareness and argues for an awareness of earth as Other. In the classroom, she claims that ecofeminism works to make explicit the nature/woman oppression ideology and that ecofeminism then resists recreating hierarchies when approaching ecological concerns.
The politics of poetry can lead to unexamined practices, particularly in the classroom. Poetry and the study of poems seems to encourage an engagement with intellectual, aesthetic and cultural contexts to the exclusion of anything beyond. Ecocomposition allows a fruitful way to extend interest. Plevin, among others, argues that the category of place moves beyond the unitary self, but not in a way that fractures or breaks, instead the self becomes embedded, enwebbed, becomes a part of something larger.
So far, I’ve talked a bit about how ecocomposition is situating itself in its call to expand the parameters of topics in the classroom and how the classroom connects to larger issues and structures (both human and non-human). I’ve underscored the importance of teaching, particularly if we’re taking an ecological and sustainable view of the academy. Place, I suggested, is a way to use and, quite literally, ground ecocomposition theory. Throughout this, I’ve been touching on the creative writing, pointing out where ecocomp theory can extend to creative writing, and briefly critiquing the inherited lore and recipes (“I used exercise a to get students to think about issue b in their writing”) that mostly passes for current creative writing pedagogy.
This brings me to the next part of my presentation, the part that I’m really excited about, some suggestions about praxis. Again, while I think these practices will prove useful across genres, I’ve had experience primarily in the poetry classroom.
And first, I want to talk about maps. I’ve always been fascinated by them as aesthetic objects as well as for the information and cultural capital they carry. But I became interested in maps and mapping as a pedagogical tool recently after reading the work of Derek Owens, Nedra Reynolds, and Robert Brooke. I want to discuss maps and their usefulness for a bit before discussing my own experiences and where I see these experiences leading.
Owens starts his composition class each semester with student-drawn maps, which leads to an essay assignment about place that has students commenting on, writing from/about their places and/or homes. He uses the maps and written student work to create discussions about turf and the situatedness of school buildings, and an unrooted curriculum and profession. It might seem like a lot to bring into an composition class, but it’s a strategy for framing and placing the classroom that I found intriguing and that fits with the theories I’ve been discussing.
As useful as Owens’ example is, I was delighted to find the work of Nedra Reynolds, a geographer. Her work has a careful, detailed discussion of the history of maps and mapping, their advantages and difficulties. In particular, she notes that maps are never complete and the text never matches the internal map of a place a person or dweller carries in their heads. The exercises that she describes—and which I’ll touch on in a moment—are the sort of activities that can direct the kind of “deep mapping” that Robert Brooke and others use in the writing classroom. Reynolds asks for maps to be expanded, returned to, and revised. She encourages exaggerations in hand-drawn maps for things closest to us, the places, people, activities that are most important. These practices are familiar to anyone who’s drawn maps for friends and colleagues (who among us ever draws to scale when providing directions?), but she also looks at how class and race influence mental maps of real places. And the questions she asks her students about how these categories show up and play out in their maps are perfectly suited to engaged pedagogy—of geography, composition, and creative writing. Reynolds also encourages attention to how bodies work in the mapped terrain, so that various abilities and perspectives are considered and engaged. She points out to students that “no-go” and other “problem” areas perceived differently if a resident, and draws attention to how class and culture form each/all of these perspectives. For Reynolds, maps are modes of encounter like walking or dwelling; maps are metaphorical, material and, overall, rhetorical.
Reynolds argues that streets are “perhaps the most contested” cultural locations. They are—or can be—inhabited by many kinds of people, as well as non-human nature. Streets are places where identity is public and constructed on the street through body, dress, performance, etc. In her conclusion, she asks students through these practices to move beyond identity to “boundaries and movement, locatedness or surveillance, and sense of place.” The same kind of linked construction of self in the environment that ecocompositionists are calling for.
During the time when maps and their pedagogical usefulness were fresh in my mind, I came across Julie Drew’s idea of students as travelers. Drew argues that students—and student knowledge—is always placed, and placed variously, which opens up different senses of culture to explore: intellectual, physical, natural, and so on. Mapping, she says, allows students to change their perspective; it reveals place and situation and lets students begin to speak back. The classroom is part of their map or maps, part of their travel, but only a small part.
I have used Drew’s and Reynolds’s ideas as well as some of the practices of Robert Brooke and Derek Owens in designing mapping exercises for my poetry classroom. I have asked students to draw maps on large sheets of newsprint paper and pull material from those places or people they found important enough to include. This activity has worked fairly well, but I’ve been thinking of ways to extend this approach.
First, I missed the opportunity to revisit, revise and challenge the maps they constructed in my classes. That is, I missed the chance to have students deepen their maps. I asked them to map any place they wanted to: home, school, activities, travel, whatever. For several days, I asked them to return to their maps to draw out stories and details for their poems. But what Brooke and others call a deep map would have us looking into the history of the places, activities, and so on. I needed to have the students continue to return to their maps with new ideas and information. The exercise was sound, I think, but reading these theorists has helped me to see how to extend the exercise and, more importantly, why I need to revise my own practice.
Second, I missed what is perhaps the least literal, and most familiar, mapping in the creative writing classroom: a map of poetic influences. Keeping track of these influences through the course of the semester or quarter would allow students to see how their writing has changed in relation to their reading and learning in the course. This kind of meta-content project—which seems rare to me in the creative writing workshop—allows for the kind of space that Haake asks for that allows for students to have a voice in their experience of the class, and offers students a way to evaluate their progress, something they can use in final course evaluations.
When I do the class again, I will extend the time we spend with mapping, as well as the questions I ask of them. I might ask them to develop multiple maps: of living space, family, friends, emotional spaces (both in the head and in the world), activities, campus activities, travel, the poets we’ve read that they identify with. Some questions I would ask them to consider would be: where do these maps overlap and intersect? what is the weather, animals, plants, people, culture, history, etc that inhabit these places? what draws you to map this place? Place gives students something real outside themselves to engage. It is the category on which other categories build. And these strategies point toward creative writing not as a set of instructions to follow for a semester, but as a way to be intellectually engaged and curious about the world.
The idea of creative writing as being available for everyone is especially important if we believe D. G. Myers—and I don’t know why we wouldn’t—that we’re not doing the rest of the students any favors by simply being talent scouts. We’ve signed on to be teachers, not editors, mechanics, insurance executives, doctors, lawyers, or what have you. Given that, ecocomposition—with its attention to place—gives us specific tools for helping students engage their world, write about it, and discover both the aesthetic joys of poetry and how they, the students, think and feel about their environment. These tools, these concerns about place and the lived environment, expand and give a frame to the sometimes haphazard exercises we assign students. I have tended to give writing prompts that resonate with whom we’re reading, or the technical aspect of poetry we’ll be discussing next week. But the details the students are usually asked to supply are arbitrary from week to week. They might be purely linguistic—lists of nouns, verbs, and so on—or an imagined event where x or y happens. Next week, the oldest person you remember from being a child. The week after, a time and place you felt afraid. But ecocomposition suggests that the lived world—and attention to that world—can allow us as creative writing teachers to deepen students’ engagement with technique as well as their understanding of what they are writing about.
The field of creative writing pedagogy, unlike when Wendy Bishop was writing, is becoming full of texts for students that combine anthologies with critical and craft apparatus. These books have exercises and prompts that allow for imitation and that suggest how a student can go beyond mere copying. That is, these books—at least, if not the instructors as well—are connected to other writers, to the cultural and intellectual work of creative writing. The next step is to connect farther out. To think ecologically about our students’ place and life beyond our classroom, to engage that life, so that they can be as much themselves as they can.
As I finish, I want to suggest that these practices in the creative writing classroom contribute to sustainability, a category that Derek Owens, for one, defines quite broadly. Certainly, it applies to the physical continuation of the campus, but he extends it as well to scholarly life. For my purposes, sustainability means that creative writing students will leave the classroom understanding what’s at stake in creative writing, will no longer fear poetry, and will understand that writing is not the solely the concern of unkempt geniuses.
A consistent frame for the creative writing class underscores the work that students accomplish, reveals the intellectual work of creativity, opens the lives of the students to exploration in ways that aren’t random and scattershot. Mapping reveals connection in a broadly ecological sense, generates detail, and allows stories and emotional resonances to come to the surface. As students deepen their maps with historical research into the human and non-human past, they can begin to see that the self they draw on for poetry cannot be removed from these other selves, lives, histories, places, practices, and so on. An overarching shape to the semester creates a creative writing class that is engaged with the rest of the student’s experience, that looks beyond the classroom to situate the student—and the course and the instructor—as part of a larger ecology without pushing an agenda or making the course a “nature poetry” course. It is the kind of engaged practice that needs to happen in a world and at time when it is too easy to feel fractured and ungrounded.

And Before I Go

We're supposed to head out to hang out with family tomorrow. Yes, with a storm bearing down on us, but we hope 'tis just a wee storm. Oh, we fervently hope. So we're packing and cleaning tonight.

To keep yourself busy in the meantime, I have some links for you. Good, tofu-sausage links! For heart health!

You can look at this response to ecocriticism's tension with experimental poets. I start with two thoughts: 1) I don't know how or why you would want a less literal environmental ethics; 2) I am interested in the rhizome, particularly as deployed as a model for ecologically webbed niches, but I remain suspicious of Delueze and Guatarri as creators of the world--and these arguments--by fiat. This frustration with what feels like a religious appeal to authority when it comes to these theorists is what I find at the heart of ecocritical rejection of postmodernism/poststructuralism. I am sympathetic to a call to rethink our place in and engagement with the world. Might experimental poetics be that way? Mm. It's also curious that the experiments the author calls for (and he's not alone in this) are the experiments that matches his own engagements and interests. I'd like to think we need to cast a bit wider.

And out of the mouths of gamers: A pair of controversies, both linked by feminism. First, for the descriptivists among you, a consideration of the singular "they" (here). Second, for a sense that the culture is still not friendly to women, follow this link (or, you know, watch tv). You'll need to click around to follow the discussion, but it's fascinating. Particularly if you compare and contrast with the first controversy ("they"). And with that first thread, it is. . . instructive. . . to note the (implied) sexes the commentators.

I might be able to blog over the break, but maybe not. So it might get cobwebby around here, not that it isn't that way most of the time. Since I don't have students, expect a quiz when I get back. And it won't be a simply "naughty/nice" true/false one.

Happy Holidays!