The
longer essay from which my talk will be drawn takes the colonial encounter with
nature – in Christopher Columbus’s writings and in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – as a point of
departure for a theoretical analysis of the environmental epistemology of
literary texts. Drawing on recent work
in evolutionary psychology, environmental philosophy, and cognitive science, I focus on those moments when the human subject encounters an unfamiliar
environment, one which challenges their affective and cognitive schema as well
as their cultural biases, and which they wish to describe for other,
non-present members of their social group.
The text that results might be called an “environmental report,” and it
represents a vital form of writing not only in early colonial literature, but
also in the American and Black Atlantic slave narrative, in the
nineteenth-century response to industrialization and westward migration, and in
many modern accounts of global migration.
The environmental report, I
argue, represents an evolutionarily adaptive response to moments of historical
and epistemic rupture, intellectual expansion, and social transformation – as experienced, phenomenologically, by an individual. What I propose is a
way of reading these texts which takes the dialectical relation between human
interiority and natural exteriority as an ontological foundation for the
cultural problems, conflicts, and histories they express.
The broader
context for this argument involves the pervasive critical tension between humanism and
culturalism: perhaps the central analytical faultline in literary ecocriticism
specifically and environmental studies more generally. Driving the debate have been, on the one
hand, studies in modern environmental psychology, ecophenomenology, and
cognitive science, and, on the other hand, the great many works being published
which focus on cultural differences in how people experience or represent
nature, from the perspectives of ethnic studies, postcolonialism, environmental
justice, and the “new materialism.” Against
that background, I propose one way of bridging humanist and culturalist
approaches to literary environmentality – namely, by formulating a theoretical model
for understanding the epistemological value of representations of nature that
are tangled up in problems of cross-cultural contact and conflict.