The Nature of the Text

            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.