On Slowing Down

As Kit Dobson explains, this forum emerges from a meeting in Banff. Driving from the coast to the Rockies and back, delighting in glimpses of the Illecillewaet Glacier and the snowfields of Rogers Pass, marvelling at the changing topography along the thousand-kilometre route, seeing in real time the expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, and catching the scent of forests on fire, I was preoccupied by persistent disciplinary concerns: the relevance of literary studies to environmental and social justice, the relation of criticism to scientific inquiry, the capacity of literature to envision alternatives to the world beyond the windshield. Such matters have no straightforward resolution; they come with the territory of environmental criticism. But after our gathering, my questions became more immediate. How should teachers and students undertake literary biodiversity studies, and why? How do we read and write under the shadow of climate change? Where should we conduct our work, and at what scale? In short, what are the methods of literary biodiversity studies?

The phrase “literary biodiversities” suggests a textual approach to the otherwise scientific investigation of biodiversity: the examination of writing about, or that depicts, ecological variation, literature about life in its astonishing variousness. But the phrase also implies something akin to “the biodiversity of literature,” by which I mean the gamut of forms in which literature occurs across the spectrum of human languages, whether spoken, written, gestural, or a combination thereof. As J. Edward Chamberlin eloquently suggests, “stories and songs” are linked by fundamental properties:

Over tens of thousands of years, storytelling has taken a variety of forms and has served a number of different purposes, shaped by the different languages and cultures and circumstances of storytelling communities. But at the core, and in the beginning, there would have been wondering about the things of the earth and the ordering of the environment, as well as a fascination with the wonders of the sky above, the waters around and the fires that alternately startled and saved them. In addition, there would have been wondering about spiritual figures and forces that, through stories and songs, helped people manage the mysteries of life and death, mysteries that for all our scientific storytelling and spiritual teaching are with us still. (10)

Because foundational literary impulses are expressed by specific people in specific ways and contexts, giving rise to a “variety of forms,” to imagine the biodiversity of literature is to ponder genre, mode, style, and shape across time and cultures, as well as underlying artistic and linguistic principles that permit comparison of works and traditions. Studying literary biodiversity involves tending to literary species in their abundance, grasping both their heterogeneity and their likeness.

In Professing Criticism, John Guillory observes that the contemporary understanding of genre is diminished:

[P]oetry was once refracted into dozens of genres that have all but disappeared in modern practice. A “poem” today exists only in a form descending from the Romantic lyric, the remnant of an atrophied genre system. Such long-durational shifts have become almost invisible in the discipline, as the organization of the curriculum has turned away from the history of literature. (355)

The salient point is that “literature,” in the broadest sense, encompasses a remarkable diversity of types. One task, therefore, is to listen to the interactions of an assortment of forms in relation to ecological systems. What do daffodil-lyrics and raven-novels and desert-memoirs and harvest-prayers say to each other? How do the shapes of stories and songs affect our encounters with non-human others? Certain ways of writing (and speaking and singing) communicate certain prospects. Thus, in Imagining Extinction, Ursula K. Heise asks whether it is “possible to acknowledge the realities of large-scale species extinction and yet to move beyond mourning, melancholia, and nostalgia to a more affirmative vision of our biological future? Is it possible to move beyond the story templates of elegy and tragedy and yet to express continuing concern that nonhuman species not be harmed more than strictly necessary?” (13). The significance of recognizing literary biodiversity can also be stated more plainly. If life itself is extraordinarily diverse, so too is literature, a category that exceeds the grasp of any single reader. The interrelated worlds of life and language teem, and overlooked books, like unexamined species, promise to overturn assumptions.

But why literary biodiversity instead of the more general term diversity, which already suggests variety? The prefix bio—from the ancient Greek bios, for life—encourages us to think of literature as alive, as existing in vital relation to other biotic and abiotic elements of an ecosystem. Is this a metaphor—book as creature, poem as sandpiper or sunflower? Of course. But biodiversity also suggests aspiration: a desire for literature, and by extension the other arts, to play living roles in our communities and societies. An ecosystem that includes humans by definition includes stories and songs, and whereas productivity and stability are biological indicators of ecological health, the vibrancy of the arts and their connection to the public are essential cultural elements of any sustainable world of which we might conceive.

Understanding the entanglement of culture and environment, of artistic imaginations with manifold forms of existence, entails close attention to the cultures, histories, and ecologies of a given location. The requisite particularity means that the nation as such may be of secondary importance; from the standpoint of biodiversity, a shift from the singular Canadian literature to the plural literatures in Canada is overdue. A departure from English—as the language of primary interest, as a term of convenience for our discipline—likewise acknowledges the multiplicity of languages spoken, sung, and written virtually everywhere, not least within the borders of this country. Reading locally but also widely—a necessary antilogy—obliges scholars to work differently. Despite the intrinsic value of the individual imagination, the paradigm of the single scholar working in isolation, in and with a single language, seems inadequate to address the scope of environmental crisis and the complexity of the ecosystems that literary biodiversity studies seeks to comprehend. Collaboration represents a crucial alternative. Close reading, historical contextualization, the use of critical theory—these and other familiar methods are powerful hermeneutic techniques that lend the discipline its remaining coherence, “English” consisting today less in a canon or curriculum than in the development and application of characteristic modes of reading. But to foreground how people are intertwined with non-human others, analysis alone may be less germane than other endeavours: poetry readings beneath the hoodoos, exhibitions of site-specific art, expressions of surprise and wonder, creative responses to “the things of the earth” (Chamberlin 10).

I am hardly the first to advocate new ways of reading, writing, and teaching that prioritize environmental awareness. I think of Laurie Ricou’s playful questions to students—“How does the woodland skipper communicate? What language does bull kelp speak?” (349)—and of recent critical responses to climate change, such as Martin Puchner’s Literature for a Changing Planet and Min Hyoung Song’s Climate Lyricism. But reshaping conventional practice is inhibited by the problem of time, or rather speed. On campus, everyone is overscheduled. Students and teachers alike are unable to take their time with books; deliberate reading, like collaborative research, stands at odds with the imperative to produce term papers or articles on demand, to meet deadlines and answer email. And off campus, the busyness of life influences our knowledge of place. Writing about Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska, Tyra A. Olstad describes a disjunction between the time typically available to tourists and the time demanded by the setting: “Few people can linger at Denali until they see the mountain, especially if it hides for a month at a time. For the eighty-five per cent of visitors who stay overnight, visits last, on average, less than three days. Those who stay less than a day spend an average of nine hours peering into some corner of the park” (74). Scholars and students of literature could do worse than to stay put, at least for a while—to slow down, to think like a mountain or moss. That can’t be done without a degree of privilege: the academic system renders time a luxury, and a program of reading less, writing less, and thinking more closely about the yellow sand verbena (Ricou 356) fits uneasily with administrative calls for productivity, accountability, and measurability, and perhaps with an ingrained sense of professional ambition as well. But I see in patient attention the potential for writing and teaching that may deepen our connections to places, languages, forms of life, and culture in its countless manifestations. At the risk of being simplistic, I suggest that those of us interested in literary biodiversity slow down. Our method should be first to pause, to look, to listen, and to step outside ourselves.

Works Cited

Chamberlin, J. Edward. Storylines: How Words Shape Our World. Douglas and McIntyre, 2023.

Guillory, John. Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. U of Chicago P, 2022.

Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. U of Chicago P, 2016.

Olstad, Tyra A. Canyon, Mountain, Cloud: Absence and Longing in American Parks. Oregon State UP, 2021.

Puchner, Martin. Literature for a Changing Planet. Princeton UP, 2022.

Ricou, Laurie. “Out of the Field Guide: Teaching Habitat Studies.” The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, edited by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, U of Georgia P, 2012, pp. 347–64.

Song, Min Hyoung. Climate Lyricism. Duke UP, 2022.

Nicholas Bradley is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria, where he teaches courses on aspects of Canadian literature and environmental writing, and an associate editor of Canadian Literature. His most recent book is Before Combustion, a collection of poems (Gaspereau Press, 2023). He lives in Victoria, BC—in ləkʷ̓ əŋən territory.