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Do stories need critics? Environmental storyism and the ends of ecocriticism
Hamilton, Jennifer Potter, Emily Quigley, Killian
Hamilton, Jennifer
Potter, Emily
Quigley, Killian
Abstract
Story, storytelling, and storying are exceptionally privileged concepts in contemporary environmental arts, humanities and social sciences research. This provocation does not set out to exhaustively describe the function of story across so large and diverse a scholarly array. It aims instead to characterise the particular, widespread tendency to posit the making of new stories, or the transforming of extant stories, or the ‘storying’ of a particular issue, place, or dilemma as the ultimate ends of environmental humanities work. We call this tendency ‘storyism’. In its broadest sense, our project attempts to construct a transdisciplinary genealogy of ‘storyism’ in relation to environmental concerns, as well as to comprehend its institutional and disciplinary orientations. For the limited purposes of this paper, we explore how ecocriticism, a field primarily interested in reading, interpreting and critiquing story, relates to the methodological innovation we describe. We hypothesise that ecocritical discourses have ironically undermined their critical values by producing and reproducing a storyist teleology which understands the generation of more, new narratives as ultimately, if not singularly, useful. We conclude by suggesting some ways in which literary ecocriticism can break out of this habit while still participating in the wider interdisciplinary field.
Keywords
Environmental humanities, ecocriticism, criticism, postcritique, storying
Date
2024
Type
Journal article
Journal
Book
Volume
Issue
Page Range
1-23
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
Collections
Relation URI
Event URL
Open Access Status
Published as ‘gold’ (paid) open access
License
CC BY 4.0
File Access
Open
Notes
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.