The incorporation of field-based research is one of ecocriticism’s most distinctive methodological departures from other modes of literary interpretation. Ecocritical fieldwork, however, does not mark a turn awayfrom the text, a privileging of empirical or subjective experience over symbolic activity. Rather, it draws on site-specific inquiry to enrich interpretive practice, offering the critic new resources for analyzing the socio-ecologicalcontexts and consequences of imaginative world-making. Ecocritical fieldwork explores affiliations, and divergences, between critical reading and other modes of inquiry, such as data-gathering, tracking, interviewing, and recording. It allows ecocritics to “ground” their readings, to draw on scientific data, empirical observation, participatory experience, or community engagement in order to explore how stories shape our engagement with landscapes and built environments, ecosystems and the Earth System. Each of the talks gathered in this special session will reflect on ecocritical fieldwork as a method, while also showcasing specific critical projects combining research in the field with textual interpretation. Spanning field sites from the Nepalese Himalaya to the American West, and textual artifacts from the Deluge story to Thoreau’sWalden, the four talks feature a broad range of field-based methods and dramatize the multiple platforms through which such research may be shared with scholarly audiences and diverse publics. We expect that the panel will support a broad discussion of the role of field-based, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative research in literary and cultural studies. In order to ensure plenty of time for discussion, initial presentations will be held to 10 (max 12) minutes.

Presentations:

(Presiding: Wai Chee Dimock,William Lampson Professor of American Studies, Yale)

In “Ground Truthing the Anthropocene,” Stephanie LeMenager (Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor in English and American Literature, University of Oregon) will reflect on her own field experience in creating the book Living Oiland in the forthcoming co-authored book To Speak of Common Places(with historian Marsha Weisiger), in order to emphasize the ways in which committing to the notion that the world istext opens possibilities for seeing and feeling the end of Modernity as environment and aspiration—in other words, ground-truthing the Anthropocene. In so doing, she will discuss the challenges and rewards of collaboration with academics across humanities disciplines and with non-academic experts, most specifically the ways in which academic writing styles buckle and shift as we situate ourselves as participant-observers in the textual “scene” and incorporate diverse voices into our reading practice an attempt to invent a situated, ecological humanism.

Sticking with the theme of collaboration, Julian Yates (H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English and Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware) will describe his co-authored project with Jeffery Jerome Cohen on Noah’s Arkive: Towards an Ecology of Refuge, reading the Genesis story of Noah and his ark both for the resources (conceptual, affective, political) it might offer and as a template or blueprint for ark-making. In the course of this project, Yates and Cohen read the long archive of responses to the Genesis story (medieval to the present) alongside contemporary arks and arks-in-the-making by way of visits to a range of sites: “God’s Ark of Safety,” in Frostburg MD; Ken Ham’s “Ark Encounter,” in Williamstown KY; architect Paolo Soleri’s “archology” at Arcosanti, AZ; and Biosphere 2, also in AZ. This kind of fieldwork, or fieldworking, proves so important because it keeps front and center the ways in which material questions of community, of refuge, come keyed to the tropes of ark-making in textual traditions. Arks, as we have learned, must be built and by that building, the phenomenalization of a blueprint or plan, whole worlds stand to be made and fall.

From here, we turn to another endeavor to bring an archive to life. In “Listening in the Field and to the Text: The Role of Sound Recording in Ecocritical Approaches to Thoreau’s Walden” Christina Katopodis (PhD Candidate CUNY Graduate Center) showcases how close listening contributes to close reading in literary scholarship and the classroom, drawing from her field recordings at Walden Pond, teaching with sound bites and “nature walks,” and a musical analysis of Thoreau’s Walden (1854). In presentation juxtaposing Thoreau’s sonic sensibility, as the source as an ethical response that led him to assert birds’ rights to wild groves in Walden, with her own recordings of Walden’s soundscapes and digital project correlating these recordings with Thoreau’s carefully-detailed map (https://thewaldensoundscape.com/), Katopodis shows how acoustic sounds—their proximity, direction, and tone—inform readings of voice, agency, and ownership in literature.

In a move of which we think Thoreau would approve, we then turn our ears from Walden Pond to the Himalaya. In “Beyul Khembalung: Refuge and Adaptation in the Himalayan Anthropocene,” Tobias Menely(Associate Professor, University of California-Davis) and Jesse Oak Taylor (Associate Professor of English, University of Washington) describe their ongoing fieldwork documenting ecological and cultural adaptation in Nepal’s Barun River valley. Due to its immense biodiversity, the Barun drainage is the centerpiece of Makalu-Barun National Park, established in 1992 as one of the first national parks in the world designed around the principle of community-based conservation. The Barun is traditionally regarded as one of the sacred beyul, high Himalayan valleys that offer sites of pilgrimage and refuge (a mythic chronotope echoed in Western stories of “Shangri-La”). Discussing Western literary depictions and local ritual practices, and drawing on fieldwork connected with an ongoing remote-listening project (https://songsofadaptation.org), this presentation explores the Barun as a place of myth and fantasy, of refuge and adaptation. Attending to a variety of human visitors (from scientists, pilgrims, and trekkers to herb gatherers and stock grazers) and nonhuman residents, Menely and Taylor ask how different representations of the Mahalangur Himāl—as mandalaor beyul, as hidden land or habitat, as a “thin place” or wilderness—might intersect with conservation and development imperatives in a time of accelerating planetary change.