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Molly Wallace, It’s the End of the Field as We Know It (and I Feel Fine), American Literary History, Volume 29, Issue 3, Fall 2017, Pages 565–578, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajx017
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Abstract
This essay reads three recent studies of ecocriticism—Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, Timothy Clark’s Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, and Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Existence—each of which grapples with the basic question of how (and even whether) to do literary criticism in an age of climate crisis. Affirming, with Clark, the infrastructural nature of climate change denial, this essay concludes that, in order to respond to the ethico-political call of the Anthropocene, the field of ecocriticism will need to be rethought, not just to take in a broader interdisciplinary context, but also to address its own material base. Though acknowledgement of academic complicity in climate disaster can sometimes appear as self-flagellation, these texts also begin to offer a vision of the admittedly difficult but ultimately necessary process of self-transformation.
