kevin
Sunday, March 9, 2008
The Mimesis Wars: Buell, Phillips, and the Status of Representation
How can we theorize a theory-adverse sub-discipline of literary studies like ecocriticism? This week, Buell and Phillips do battle over this and other questions. As we watch the battle unfold, I hope we have some questions of our own. Post them here, with your replies, and we'll have a conversation about them on Wednesday night before taking a much-needed week to commune with some real trees--or some representations of trees, if that's your preference.
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March 10, 2008
John S. Sonin
Eng. 423—Blog 8
Moving Forever Forward
A question generated in reading Phillips’ first chapter has been churning in my mind for a couple decades, now. Why can’t the nascent practice of this already-labeled new literary paradigm, “Ecocriticism” (for me, this mulling-over, churning in my mind, a conception, more recently finding articulation with this class, has, however, been simmering around in my head since the late 80’s), begin criticizing literature from the perspective of a roiling, churning, cycling-through-birth-and-death-of-organic-(and inorganic!)-material, perpetually building in earthly substance and distinction, be addressed?
I realize this hypothesis of mine may not be clearly represented or described but believe me, it’s an apprehension that the “narration of life cycles in a perpetually rejuvenating rainforest” might help to crystallize for my readers.
Though I may not be expostulating those terms appropriately in an upper-division English class context, the concept I wish to get across should be evident. This idea when followed to its extreme resolves in a transfer of energy, a finite value in the universe, to the intensity of a star, at least until the energy begins dissipation for in an entropic universe that is the ultimate consequence of everything, to what I recall C. S. Lewis termed something like…”everything wants to become more like itself and unlike anything else.”
Looking over what I read I had a sense of 'The Matrix' come to mind. "Today the real is contested not only in the academy, but in reality as well."(Phillips, 184) Strange line of reasoning in my head.
A question that I have: does the use of mimesis in literature, especially in ecocriticism, when the age of virtual reality is upon us cause a hyperreality that excludes natural nature and make a realistic representation or mimetic representation improbable if not impossible? Furthermore, by saying that ecology needs to return to a pre-modernist state do we ignorantly remove the fault and responsibility to respond to the causation of our reality, questionable as that reality is?
In the preface of "The Truth of Ecology" Phillips says that the intent of this book is to "rediscover, to complicate, and hence to redefine ecocriticism". From the two chapters we read and the preface all I heard was harping, with a few general conclusions. One thing that I did understand from both authors was that the use of realism to describe what we call the 'natural world' is more or less dated and nearly impossible to do justice to. Phillips posits that to translate nature into literature mimetically is viewing the 'text or world without a sense of this difference' and that 'to attempt to view (text or world, my parantheses) through the looking glass, and we all know what you are going to see when you attempt this view'(11). In other words we place our own biases that do not take into account the different views of critical theories, causing a mimetic translation or representation to be falsified by our tendencies to view nature through individual looking glasses. This is why Phillips say that 'ecocritic's epiphany is more self-revelatory than revelatory of the world'(11).
Buell has a similiar but different approach to criticizing literature. Using Barry Lopez's 'notion of 'outer mimesis'' he states that 'literature functions as science's less systematic but more versatile complement'(94) Otherwords, science has a better grip on the reality of mimesis but literature has the functionality to display mimesis in its 'true' form. I say 'true' because according to Phillips 'truth should have suffered some frave damage, beyond repair, and to have become infected with falsity, so that some truths now seem to be lies.'(29) So in all reality, the truth of mimesis must be backed by scientific proof in order to be placed positively and correctly into literature.
I'm going to have to come back to these questions later.
As usual, Buell largely continues the droll and another selected reading, in this case Phillips, captures more attention. Phillips critiques of Buell seem to be not only valid but incredibly witty, as much of his somewhat dense writing is. One especially interesting discussion Phillips entered into was that of Hypereality and texts and that of Buell’s espoused environmental realism. The idea that in efforts to create a ‘real’ picture of the environment or ecology is actually antithetical is so simple and yet so true. In one sense it leads me to believe that Buell’s, as well as others, discussion and illuminations about the environment, deeply entwined with prior euphemism of the pastoral and wilderness, are in a certain sense distancing the realities of the contemporary worlds tensions with nature. On another level, it seems to me that Phillips, while decrying the idealizations, seems to participate in a bit of philosophical jostling which points fun at Bull’s arguments. However legitimist these indictments may be, what purpose does it serve for Phillips? I think it is ultimately wrapped up in some of his final word of the first chapter:
“It’s time to disenchant ecocriticism. We can do that be deploying theoretical, philosophical, and scientific insights in the development of rational for describing and interpreting the multifarious relations of culture and nature in the present day, as well as in the recent past” (41).
What than are we to say about similar statements made by some of the first comments regarding ecocriticism? Have they failed? Only to be critiqued and brought up to par through Phillips?
Matt Boline
Back to the troping...
While I thoroughly enjoyed the creative and lyrical means Phillips utilizes to cut down Buell and other ecocritics all too wrapped up in rhetoric and searching for truth in a world of imitation. What then, according to Phillips, can move the trope of ecocriticism away from the "fan club" and into legitimacy?
Ecocritics need to not be so "insouciant" about this memesis. It (ecocriticism) needs to no revel in the artificial world that is created for us in literature and zoos. Placing importance on this is "dubious" according to Phillips. I wish that Phillips would have gone further in depth, which he might in the other chapters, into Leopold's image of the mountain and of the bear. Leopold speaks of this mimetic discourse, only he does not equivocate the bear as still being a bear after St. George in overalls dispatches the Big Foot of the Escudilla mountains. Or, the way in which the wolf that Leopold himself shoots turns into something else once it has been destroyed. In the same fashion animals in mimetic captivity are not the same animals that they once were. They are human actors, as Phillips and Eco note, Chester the bear had turned into a sideshow in hyperreality. And, just as Eco recognizes. "This docility arouses some suspicions. Where does the truth of ecology lie?"
Phillips seems to suggest that the truth of Ecology lies in the pastoral realms of "imitations, copies and fakes..." which are cherished and also as Phillips cites Eco,"typifies American culture as a whole[.]"
My favorite citation from Phillips draws lines of distinction between himself and Buell. Phillips being the optimist and Buell being the pessimist (realist). Buell says: "to posit disjunction between text and world is both an indispensable starting point for mature literary understanding and a move that tends to efface the world." Phillips posits: "the world is not so easily effaced, unless one has very little faith in it to begin with." To me this is a defining point in the book as to where Phillips "lies" within the context of the ecocritical movement. The fact that Buell seems to have a deeper purpose within himself identifies him, in my eyes, as a true ecocritic, he has a goal in mind with his criticism. Phillips just want to be a critic! Phillips does have a lot of good things to say and poses some serious questions and advice that ecocritics need to heed. But he is in the end an ego-critic not an eco-critic.
Ben Crozier
12 March 2008
I almost laughed aloud when Phillips wrote about the need to "disenchant" ecocriticism at the conclusion of the first chapter; I don't think that ecocriticism is very enchanting at all. Maybe I'm missing something very profound here, but to me, Phillips doesn't seem to be saying anything new. Environmental literature can't be based on mimesis: okay, I buy that. The pastoral is inadequate for expressing divisions between nature and culture: makes sense to me. Postmodernism is flawed because it fails to make an accurate examination of nature (for example, nature is obviously not "gone for good"): this all rings true. Ecocriticism has to "hybridize": yes, God knows that it has to be interdisciplinary. And the solution, once again, is to eliminate the barriers between nature and culture. To do this, she simply places a "-" between the two words. Nature-culture. It looks very nice, but how is it applicable in the world?
Or, as Phillips might word it: How does nature-culture lie "in" the world?
After readings the readings this week the question that comes to my mind is what Ecology is? It is a good thing that Dana Phillips book was required reading because he does a good job of explaining the how literary and cultural theorists have appropriate terms from the science of Ecology into their linguistic universe and misrepresented or have changed the meaning of what those terms actually mean. There seems to be a lot of ambiguity in interpretation between literary and science representations of nature. If Ecocritism or nature writing is going to represent nature than science undoubtedly is going to play a part. I do feel that there should be critics of science just, as Phillips points out it was science interruptions of nature in the forms of industry and agriculture that have caused environmental problems in the first place.
March 19, 2008
John S. Sonin
My, my, my! Matt and Forrest have incarnated the dilemma of society when its seminal means of inter-relatedness hinges on the eternal Judeo-Christian conflict—most people are unable to discern the representations of reality as either good or evil, positive or negative, growing or dying, optimistic or pessimistic, trusting or suspicious, all because “wittiness” (intellectual entertainment) is ascribed to the personalities that recognize the absurd irony of the human tendency toward selfish/laziness in the human struggle to be like nature and forever exert effort. Push ahead, but don’t forget to hold-on tight!
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