Notes for Glotfelty and Slovic essays


Consider, first, the differences between “space,” “place,” and “land.” One critic has offered a simple differentiation. Aleida Assmann distinguishes between space and place in a way that inherits much from human geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. She writes, “spaces [are] geographical and political domains,” “places are marked by names and qualified by histories,” and “land is invested with myth” (emphasis in original 58). Assmann writes, “place is invested with experience and history . . . and resonate[s] with human aspirations, values, traditions, and memories” (59). When we think of “places” as being marked by names, we can see this as being true: bordered physical sites become places when we name them, when we possess them. This might be understood differently as well, apart from conceptions of possession or ownership. A place can have spiritual or cultural significance, long held by a community through history, and bear a name (particular mountains or fields or rivers bear names). Native American creation legends reveal this to be true. Assmann’s conception of “land,” however, seems to designate this mythic sense of historicity (“land” not “place” as the mythic historic site), that a plot of land is the site of a family’s or community’s ambitions for productivity (or the earth or of the family) and their passing-on of traditions and stories. For her, this kind of passing-on, this inheritance by ancestors and community members, happens on land. In our class we are more concerned, however, with “place,” and for our purposes the distinctions between place and land, as per her conception, become blurrier.

In the essays you read for today, you encountered many statements about place, one of which stands out to me in light of the comments by Assmann above. Slovic quotes Wendell Berry’s essay “The Long Legged House” and this idea: “man belongs to the place without the place belonging to the man” (363). This sentence of Berry’s emerges out of his awareness that despite growing reassessments of attachment to a place, a relationship of possession does remain, as it were. We often think of places as sites that we can own, or render as objects. In Berry’s passage, it is as if humans are the possessions of places themselves, and this is an interesting concept. If we were to proceed with this paradigm, surely man’s use of and relationship to place would be radically different than it is now.

The Glotfelty essay outlines the ecocritical approach to reading literary texts, an approach that she defines by employing some of the structures of other approaches (like feminist literary criticism) and by offering a justification of her approach by virtue of the obvious importance of changes in our environment to people worldwide and because of the existence of other methods of critical inquiry already entrenched within the academy (like Marxist criticism, deconstructionism, and feminist criticism). Ecocriticism, then, “places” changes to place, relationships to place, violations of place, in the foreground of readings of literary texts. It is not just a way of reading “nature writing,” for example. An ecocritical theoretical approach can be applied, I would argue, to texts that decidedly use natural places in the service of human concerns (a factor Buell identified as disqualifying a text from categorization as a piece of “environmental literature”). Ecocritical approaches can help us to see these usurpations, power dynamics, and, potentially, moments of violence or recovery. Glotfely contends that ecocritical approaches to reading literary texts are timely, and (when she was writing in the late nineties), ready to play a prominent role in the readings and theoretical practices of those studying American, English, and, certainly, global literatures. Environmental concerns transgress geo-political boundaries; thus, ecocritical approaches can be used to read the texts produced across these human-made borders.

Let’s take one more look at a provocative idea of Wendell Berry’s, as cited and summarized by Slovic. Berry directly contends that a person “can come to belong to a place” (qtd. in Slovic 362). In regard to how literature and our experiences of it can change our relationships as human to the places where we reside, Slovic conveys Berry’s claim: “Berry’s work implies the need to move beyond complacent acceptance of our ‘internal representations’ of the places where we live or visit, the need to see things consciously, to become aware--and it indicates also the role of literature in inspiring and guiding ‘awakening’ (to use Thoreau’s words) of its readers” (362).

We spent the beginning of class getting our bearings with the unwieldy nature of the terms used periodically above, mostly with the term “place.” I started off these notes by giving Aleida Assman’s “definitions.” In class, I read to you Yi-Fu Tuan’s definitions too. His are very clear. Of course, many of these assessments are philosophical. How can we prove them? The point is that these conceptions of and distinctions between these terms are relevant to our discussions of these ecologically “minded” works of literature and we must, then, develop our own conceptions of the usage and utility of these terms.



Students’ definitions of “space,” “place,” and “land”:

Space: physical area occupied by an object or being; an open area; encompasses an area or an idea; physical word for something that is not graspable but is around us; can be seen, felt, and otherwise sensed; the air around us

Place: a set space belonging to an object or area; a specific area, a geographic area, or a state of being; a destination or location; a physical spot or defined location (somewhere you can go to)

Land: a mass of environment; a surface on which to walk or cultivate or a reference to a country; that which is not water; terrain of the earth; something that can be owned or possessed; desirable; can show status; is limited