Abstract #5

[Jay Jay]

Philippon, Daniel J.  “Is Early American Environmental Writing Sustainable? A Response to Timothy Sweet.”  Early American Literature.  45.2 (2010): 417-23.  MLA International Bibliography.  Web.  23 June 2011.

Daniel J. Philippon’s essay addresses the contributions of American literary history to the project of ecocriticism, and the ways in which early American concerns do apply to works from later periods, which should not be dismissed by ecocritics.  Philippon identifies the inclusion of the “nonhuman world in literary and cultural criticism” as “an unqualified good on both philosophical and biological grounds” (432).  It is important to acknowledge that environmental problems cannot be solved without the cooperation of academics and professionals from fields of science, technology, and humanities.  The essay by Timothy Sweet clearly demonstrates the benefits of interdisciplinary study, which ecocritism relies upon, by pursuing both a temporal sense and spatial sense of “the continuities and discontinuities of environmental discourse” (433).  While Sweet prefers the eco-economic approach, Philippon broadens the perspective by including the “three pillars” approach or the “triple bottom line” (“social, ecological, and economic” and “people, planet, and profit”) (434).  An additional criticism of Sweet’s essay includes too little emphasis on the discontinuities between early and later periods, especially “in terms of the pace and scale of technological change,” such as biotechnology and information technology (435).  Lastly, the georgic critical approach ignores texts that “exist outside the purview of the pastoral” as well those that include a “built environment” (436).

Abstract #4

[Jay Jay]

Sweet, Timothy.  “Projecting Early American Environmental Writing.”  Early American Literature.  45.2 (2010): 403-16.  MLA International Bibliography.  Web.  23 June 2011.

In order to successfully connect the concerns of early American environmental writing with the issues of later periods, Timothy Sweet proposes three different models: the contrastive model, the early American origins model, and the environmentally inflected origins model.  The essay addresses the concept of ecological-economics theory as a filter for these three models.  Eco-economic theory takes into account the differences of human-made capital and natural capital, unlike neoclassical economic theory.  Additionally, eco-economics makes a distinction between pastoral and georgic: pastoral is based on human alienation from nature and requires a “movement of retreat and return,” whereas georgic denies this movement because it claims we never left nature.  Sweet states “place-connectedness, regional identity, and the moral value of ‘nature’” can be located within the early American pastoral’s literary legacy (423).  Nostalgia can be revealed through a biogeographical approach because it takes into account  a global context, including America’s legacy of European colonization and its relationship to our growth narrative of “land of abundance” (425).  Sweet concludes with the necessity of aaplying the biogeographical frame to the field of natural history because American colonists utilized the genre.  The genre of natural history has since evolved to accommodate paradigm shifts in the ensuing centuries, including the shifting boundary between literary and nonliterary/subliterary.

Rough Draft

[Jay Jay]

“So long and toilsome a Journey:” Sarah Kemble Knight’s Nonhuman and Human Encounters

[Rough Draft]

This paper will function as an exploration of Sarah Kemble Knight’s The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York through an ecofeminist lens by examining the representation of human and nonhuman in the text.  Specifically, I will investigate the relationships forged by Knight between human and nonhuman entities through her use of language, which has the power to render the entity as subject or object.  Vivid descriptions of urban and rural landscapes are provided by Knight, as well as numerous interactions with people she encounters during her five day journey between Boston and New Haven.  I am interested in whether or not the binary of human and nonhuman remains static, or changes with each encounter during the journey.  A sense of fluidity could indicate Knight’s willingness to view her relationship with the landscape as subject-to-subject, rather than subject-to-object.  

Ecofeminism explores the connection between the degradation of nature and the domination of women, and the consequences of patriarchy artificially linking the two entities.  By examining the manner in which Knight represents human (particularly other women, Native Americans, and African American slaves) and the nonhuman environment, I hope to locate moments of resistance to patriarchal ideology by Knight.  However, I suspect I will find Knight more often than not upholding, and even participating in, the degradation of both nature and the domination of people of color based on their economic, class, and racial status.  If certain humans are described as objects rather than subjects, can a connection be found to landscape as subject too?

Literature Review

There is a small body of criticism dedicated to Knight’s journal, and I chose four articles to focus on for the purpose of this exploration.  Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola examines Knight’s relationship with the landscape through the filter of the picaresque genre.  The frontier landscape, according to Derounian-Stodola, becomes “literary, colonized, domesticated, ‘urbanized,’ dangerous, comic, practical, and amoral” (123).  Knight’s descriptions of the landscape challenge the Puritan view of the landscape, rendering Knight’s voice unorthodox.  Additionally, Knight’s landscape is not transformed by the garden metaphor found by Annette Kolodony in other women’s writings; in contrast, Knight often “urbanizes” her landscape, referring frequently to towns rather than the frontier.

Research Abstract: Searching for Sustainability in Early American Literature

[Blake's Abstract # 5]

Philippon, Daniel J. “Is Early American Environmental Writing Sustainable? A Response to Timothy Sweet.” Early American Literature 45.2 (2010): 417-23. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 30 June 2011.

Daniel J. Philippon says issues which Timothy Sweet raises in his article “Projecting Early American Environmental Writing” and his book American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature deserve more critical attention because exploring ways in which humans and nonhumans can work together towards a sustainable future is increasingly relevant.  Critical studies of nonhuman nature is now accepted and expected among academics addressing cultural concerns.  Also, addressing environmental concerns from an academic perspective is relevant because a lack of sustainable living practices damages the environment and prospects for human and nonhuman survival.

Philipon identifies Sweet’s central concerns as determining what early American literature can add to ecocriticism and discovering how early American paradigms can help the ecocritical cause today.  Philippon argues that the humanities—including studies of early American literature—are as important to the ecocritical cause as the sciences because human behavior and beliefs are at the root of the damage to the environment; therefore, to truly find solutions to our environmental problems we must examine ourselves, our definition of “human,” and ultimately change our behaviors.  Looking back at early American writing is valuable to ecocritics because they can study trends in human behavior towards the environment and beliefs about nature over time and across the space of geography. 

Philipon notes that Sweet purposes a georgic focus, as opposed to a pastoral focus, for ecocritical analysis of early American texts in order to expose the fact that our economic system relies on ecological capabilities for its success.  However, Philipon cautions against prioritizing the economic oriented environment because it creates a hierarchy, which reduces the importance of noneconomic nature.  In this light, a georgic orientation seems reductive because all elements of sustainability must be addressed; in addition to economic concerns, social and ecological ones must be addressed as well.  For example, asking who are the labors working on the land and who else is affected by this labor can be one way of investigating economic justice perspectives.  Asking what role religious arguments for sustainability have in the ecocritical cause further necessarily complicate the georgic perspective by engaging with Puritan and Quaker philosophy. 

 While Sweet says that exploring the reoccurrence of beliefs about nature throughout history is important, Philipon adds that addressing the changing context in which these similar ideas are presented in is vital.  For example, technology is a contextual factor that must be taken into account when examining attitudes about nature because it not only transmits these beliefs but shapes them.  Technology is even valuable to the ecocritical because it can aid in the transmission of solutions for sustainable living.  In conclusion, Philipon admits that if Americans do still operate from a colonial paradigm, like Sweet believes, then ecocritical analysis of early American texts can reveal much about our current eco-economic relationships.  

Research Abstract: Early American Environmental Writing

[Blake's Abstract #4]

Sweet, Timothy. “Projecting Early American Environmental Writing.” American Literary History 22.2 (2010): 419-31. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 1 July 2011.

Timothy Sweet makes a case for how studying early American environmental writing can contribute to the current ecocritical cause. 

Sweet identifies the contrastive model of early American environmental studies, which examines discontinuities in beliefs about the environment.  Thoreau is considered the inventor of the nature essay, which signals the official shift from anthropocentric thinking to a concern for nature and the impact of technological advancements on undeveloped nature.  Early American environmental genres identified in the pre-Thoreau period include promotional, travel, scientific, historical, and even religious documents.  Early American ecofeminists also acknowledge a shift to more eco-conscious writing around the same time; however, they generally concentrate on fiction, beginning in colonial America that attempts to domesticate nature or pursue a nondomestic space in nature.    

In contrast with the discontinuity model, the American origins model of studying environmental writing is primarily concerned with studying continuity in attitudes about the environment and identifying the beginnings of the attitudes in colonial texts.  An example is the denial that our eco-economy is based on limited natural resources; the origin of this belief can be tracked from the separation of scientific texts from common literature; to the specialization of economics, which denied the existence of an environmental foundation; and ultimately to the pastoralization of nature, which only considers non-economic environments “nature.” Therefore, because the American ecological economy is still viewed with a colonial attitude, studying the colonial origins of this eco-economic paradigm will help Americans acknowledge that an eco-economy based on imagining inexhaustible production capabilities is impossible and unethical.  A georgic perspective denies the human/nature separation and urges humans to acknowledge that we do not live outside nature—nature is not separate from economic environments.  In contrast, the pastoral glorifies the escape from urban life to non-economic nature and acknowledges human alienation from nature because of our development. 

A biogeographical approach examines both discontinuities and continuities in American environmental thought but it contextualizes these beliefs with a global perspective.  A biogeographical approach also studies the effect people have on human and nonhumans in regional ecosystems as they move throughout the globe.  From this paradigm, the concept of American wilderness is invalid and American nature was never “pure” because before European colonization because it was occupied by Native Americans who hunted and farmed the land.  

Sweet calls for an expansion of the American nature writing canon to include nonliterary genres because environmental writing often took these forms in early America.  He also proposes that a survey class of colonial nature writing can be used to expose a concern with environmental issues, which disappears in later American writings. Sweet concludes that early American nature writing holds much potential for the contemporary ecocritical cause in examining sustainability can be achieved with consideration for humans and nonhumans. 

Conference Proposal

[Blake]

Examining the Ecofeminist Elements of Bartram’s Anthropomorphosis Figures in Travels

 
        In the introduction to Chapter Three of William Bartram, the Search for Nature's Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings, Laurel Ode-Schneider analyzes Bartram’s views on the relationship between human and nonhuman nature as presented in two previously unpublished letters.  She finds that Bartram’s anthropomorphosis figures in these letters are used to reverse the human/animal hierarchy in order to illustrate its unbalanced nature.  Ode-Schneider remarks that the anthropomorphosis figures found in Travels fail to function in a similar manner as the ones in his letters; she states that they operate only as unserious metaphors.

 I disagree with Ode-Schneider that the anthropomorphosis figures in Travels are insignificant.  Instead, I agree with Charles H. Adams who proposes that Bartram’s anthropocentric metaphors work to illustrate the interrelatedness of humans and animals and remind his readers that they should observe themselves in nature because nature is essential to humans.  I expand upon Adam’s ecological argument, and find that when examined with an ecofeminist lens the anthropomorphosis figures reveal Bartram’s recognition of (an)other in nature, human and nonhuman interdependence, and the necessity for diversity instead of domination.  Therefore, an ecofeminist analysis proves that Bartram’s anthropomorphosis figures in Travels function to expose the false nature of patriarchal Enlightenment ideology, which espouses that man is superior to animals. 

Because Adams demonstrated that Bartram’s anthropocentric literary devices are used in a liberating instead of oppressive manner, I believe the term “anthropomorphosis” is more appropriate because the metaphors are not employed to show that humans are central to the universe, but they are a means to oppose the Enlightenment idea that “a mere mechanical impulse” drives nonhuman animals instead of reason and emotion.             

I will examine three specific anthropomorphosis figures in Travels to illustrate my claim: a bear cub that Bartram describes as crying like a child after hunters kill its mother, which shows that animals are not something Other than human, but instead are Another being with their own families and emotions; a spider that he imagines is a Native American hunting prey demonstrates that animals and humans are similarly interdependent on the web of life for sustenance; also, by painting a group crayfish as soldiers fighting a school of fish, he demonstrates a need to acknowledge that the diversity of biota expands beyond narrow categories of Linnaean classification and includes diversity in characteristics such as temperament, intelligence, strategy, building ability. 

Bartram’s expression of ecofeminist-like philosophical beliefs through his anthropomorphosis figures proves that they are not merely “whimsical,” like Ode-Schneider says, but that they function to reject patriarchal ideology.  It is essential to recognize these figures in Travels as one of Bartram’s devices to express his opposition to the Enlightenment man/nature hierarchy because it further clarifies how Bartram was resistant to colonial ideology of his time.  Future exploration of the relationship between the anthropomorphosis figures in Travels and the metaphors in his subsequent letters might show that the letters reveal views that Bartram had always held but did not feel they could be blatantly stressed in a published text because his primary audience was Enlightenment America.

Conference Paper Proposal

[Jay Jay]

Conference Paper Proposal:

Madam Knight’s Journey: Bad Rivers, Spangled Skies & Terrifying Darkness

This paper will function as an exploration of Sarah Kemble Knight’s The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York through an ecofeminist lens by examining the representation of human and nonhuman in the text.  Specifically, I will investigate the relationships forged by Knight between human and nonhuman entities through her use of language and metaphor, which has the power to render the entity as subject or object.  Vivid descriptions of urban and rural landscapes are provided by Knight, as well as numerous interactions with people she encounters during her five day journey between Boston and New Haven.  I am interested in whether or not the binary of human and nonhuman remains static, or changes with each encounter during the journey.  A sense of fluidity could indicate Knight’s willingness to view her relationship with the landscape as subject-to-subject, rather than subject-to-object.  

Ecofeminism explores the connection between the degradation of nature and the domination of women, and the consequences of patriarchy artificially linking the two entities.  By examining the manner in which Knight represents human (particularly other women, Native Americans, and African American slaves) and the nonhuman environment, I hope to locate moments of resistance to patriarchal ideology by Knight.  However, I suspect I will find Knight more often than not upholding, and even participating in, the degradation of both nature and the domination of people of color based on their economic, class, and racial status.  If certain humans are described as objects rather than subjects, can a connection be found to landscape as subject too?

While this paper utilizes ecofeminist literary criticism, which is a branch of ecofeminism, it still adheres to the call to action inherent in ecofeminism.  By applying ecofeminism to an early American text that has secured its place in the canon, I am arguing that it can withstand multiple interpretational lenses.  If Knight’s journal can provide critics and readers with another scholarly perspective not previously explored, then perhaps other texts from the same time period can do the same.  Additionally, Knight’s journal is available in a scholarly anthology, making it easily available (and affordable) for the college classroom.

My intervention in the current scholarly discourse about Knight’s journal does not disagree or contradict previous scholarship; on the contrary, borrowing a phrase from Annette Kolodny, it is a turning of the lens that can only add, not detract, to the conversation.  Scholarship regarding Knight’s journal does not yet include the landscape or the environment as an entity in its own right, nor does it explore the connections between women and nature.  Ecological literary criticism and ecofeminist criticism are growing fields, and this paper is an experiment to see how well an early American text withstands an ecofeminist reading without falling into the trap of ascribing feminist or ecological motivations to Knight.

Preliminary Bibliography

[Blake's Working Bibliography]

Examining the Ecofeminist Elements of Bartram’s Anthropocentric Figures in Travels

Primary Source:


Harper, Francis, ed. The Travels of William Bartram, Naturalist’s Edition. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1998. Print. 


I have chosen to use this scholarly edition of Bartram’s Travels, because it is the most commonly cited version in academic articles.  The editor’s notes state that Travels was reproduced “with practically the same exactness as if it were the 1791 edition,” even indicating the original pagination (vii).  I have confirmed this after reviewing a microfilm copy of the 1791 version and comparing the two.




Secondary Sources Used to Formulate My Claim:


Adams, Charles H. “Reading Ecologically: Language and Play in Bartram's Travels.” The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South 32.4 (1994): 65-74. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 June 2011.


In this journal article, Adams demonstrates how with an ecological lens Bartram’s metaphorical language, along with other devices, function as a way for him to explain the interrelationships and diversity that he observes in nonhuman nature (67-69).  Adams proposes that Bartram’s anthropocentric metaphors—such as a laughing trout—work to illustrate the interrelatedness of humans and animals and remind his readers “to find [their] reflection in nature” because nature is essential to humans (73).  I agree with Adams, and plan to use his article to support my claim that the anthropocentric metaphors in Travels are significant because they express Bartram’s theory about human and nonhuman nature.  I will suggest that in addition to reading his anthropocentric figures ecologically, reading them with an ecofeminist paradigm yields the additional insight into the metaphors—that they also express Bartram’s opposition to a conception of the man/nature hierarchy as expressed in patriarchal Enlightenment ideology.




Magee, Judith. The Art and Science of William Bartram. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State UP, 2007. Print.


This book provides me with information essential to understanding the context of Bartram’s views of nature including an explanation of his non-traditional Quaker background, the Enlightenment ideas that he would have been exposed to, and how his philosophy regarding nonhuman nature differed from the Chain of Being theory, which espoused a hierarchical relationship of organisms (151).  Magee states that Bartram related animals and plants to humans in order to reduce the “gradation” of separation expressed in the Chain of Being theory.  However, I claim that by applying an ecofeminist lens to examine the anthropocentric figures it becomes evident that Bartram used them to oppose the patriarchal ideology of the Enlightenment.  I purpose a more confident stance than Magee, stating that scholars can now understand Bartram’s view of nature as not just “more egalitarian than the standard hierarchical structure” but as a heterarchical relationship between human and nonhuman nature (151).




Murphy, Patrick D. Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques. Albany: State U of New York P, 1995. Print.


This book provides me with my ecofeminist theoretical foundation which I will apply to Bartram’s Travels to prove that his use of anthropocentric metaphors work to oppose patriarchal ideology; for example, I will use Murphy’s concept of “anotherness” to examine the manner in which Bartram raises the nonhuman to a status that is equal with humans through his metaphors, ultimately illustrating that he acknowledges the interdependence of all life, which is contrary to the dominant Enlightenment beliefs of his time.    




Ode-Schneider, Laurel.  “Chapter Three: ‘The Dignity of Human Nature’ William Bartram and the Great Chain of Being.” Introduction. William Bartram, the Search for Nature's Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings. Eds. Thomas Hallock, Nancy E. Hoffmann, and Joel T. Fry. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2010. 340-46. Print. 


I formulated my thesis in opposition to an idea presented in this book chapter introduction.  Ode-Schneider analyzes Bartram’s views on the relationship between human and nonhuman nature as presented in two previously unpublished letters.  She finds that Bartram’s anthropocentric figures in these letters are used to reverse the human/animal hierarchy in order to illustrate its unbalanced nature, thereby exposing the false ideology.  Ode-Schneider remarks that the anthropocentric figures found in Travels are used “merely as a lighthearted troupe” (341).


I disagree with Ode-Schneider that the anthropocentric figures in Travels are insignificant; I find that when examined with an ecofeminist lens, they reveal Bartram’s recognition of (an)other in nature, human and nonhuman interdependence, and the necessity for diversity instead of domination.  Bartram’s expression of these philosophical beliefs through his anthropocentric figures proves that they are not merely “whimsical,” but that they also function to reject Enlightenment patriarchal ideology, which claims nonhuman nature is inferior to man, should be divided into static categories and classifications, and valued as a commodity for man to dominate and use.




Other Sources Consulted: 


Arner, Robert D. “Pastoral Patterns in William Bartram's Travels.” Tennessee Studies in Literature 18 (1973): 133-145. Print.


Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Belknap P, 1995. Print.


Cox, John D. “Representing America: The American as Traveler in the Work of J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and William Bartram.” Traveling South: Travel Narratives and the Construction of American Identity. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2005. 19-62. Print.


Hallock, Thomas. “On the Boarders of a New World: William Bartram’s Travels.” From the Fallen tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749-1826. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2003. 149-173. Print. 


Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975. Print.


Kornegay, Burt. “Nature, Man, and God.” Kathryn E. Holland Braund, and Charlotte M. Porter, eds. Fields of Vision: Essays on the Travels of William Bartram. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2010. 81-90. Print.


Ralston, Ramona. “Signs of Science and the Sublime in Bartram’s Travels: Subverting the Colonialist Agenda.” Semiotics 1998. 290-298. New York: Lang, 1999. Print.


Schiebinger, Londa L., and Claudia Swan. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. Print.


Slaughter, Thomas P., ed.  Travels and Other Writings. By William Bartram. 1791.  New York: Literary Classics US, 1996. Print.


Terrie, Philip G. “Tempests & Alligators: The Ambiguous Wilderness of William Bartram.” North Dakota Quarterly 59.2 (1991): 17-32. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 12 June 2011.

Madam Knight’s Journey: Bad Rivers, Spangled Skies & Terrifying Darkness (Short Paper)

[Jay Jay]

Madam Knight’s Journey: Bad Rivers, Spangled Skies & Terrifying Darkness

I have tentatively chosen Sarah Kemble Knight’s The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York for the focus of my conference paper in the hopes that I will discover ecofeminist characteristics within the text not yet discussed by early American scholars.  The journal was written from 1704—1705 and existed in manuscript form until 1825 when Theodore Dwight published it.  Knight records her journey from Boston, Massachusetts to New Haven, Connecticut with a side trip to New York along what is described by Sargent Bush, Jr. as a “rustic” but “increasingly well traveled” road (69).  The road from Boston to New Haven is traveled in five days, but Knight does not return to Boston right away, wintering in Connecticut for almost five months.  Knight’s experience with rural America provides modern readers with a fascinating glimpse into an America caught between the Massachusetts Bay Colony foundation and the American Revolution (70).

Modern readers are not the only audience that has benefited from her writing: Knight’s record of her absence from Boston “was written not for publication but for the amusement of a private circle of relatives and friends” (74).  In 1825 Dwight published the manuscript and shortly after, the manuscript his transcription is based upon was destroyed, leaving scholars with no original source for comparison.  Bush, Jr. reminds us that the reclaiming of Knight by Dwight is important because Dwight and his contemporaries were attempting to establish an American literary tradition and heritage (78-9).  The 1820s coincide with the creation of the myth of the American wilderness, spearheaded by James Fenimore Cooper, and Knight’s journal showcases the contrast between urban and rural America of 1704—1705.  The last lines of Dwight’s introduction are evidence of the transformation from rural frontier to urban landscape in one hundred and twenty years:

Over that tract of country where she travelled about a fortnight, on horseback, under the direction of a hired guide, with frequent risks of life and limb, and sometimes without food or shelter for many miles, we proceed at our ease, without exposure and almost without fatigue, in a day and a half, through a well peopled land, supplied with good stage-coaches and public houses, or the still greater luxuries of the elegant steam boats which daily traverse our waters. (86)

The landscape is spoken of in terms of transformation, from an empty and dangerous wilderness to a peopled and heavily traveled land that has been conquered, subdued and tamed.  Replication of Knight’s hazardous journey is no longer available to those living in Boston or New Haven of the 1820s.