Introduction: Ecocritical Geographies, Geocritical Ecologies, and the Spaces of Modernity

Abstract

At a Modern Language Association convention several years ago, following a session we had organized on geocriticism, a group of us discussed the possibility of continuing what we took to be a crucial conversation on the relations between space, place, mapping, and literature.1 While we all agreed that the topic was both timely and necessary, some wondered if the ostensible, if misleading, neutrality of space or spatiality worked against the project. That is, one could not necessarily be an advocate for space or spatiality, as opposed to advocating for a distinctive political policy or social cause, and expect others to rally around that banner. As one colleague put it, naming ecocriticism as the specific counter-example, geocriticism does not have a clearly visible political constituency or program. Whereas ecocritics, along with virtually all scholars associated with environmental literary studies, are generally understood to be advocates for the environment, often serving as activists with respect to alltoo-salient matters of environmentalism, conservation, preservation, sustainability, climate change, and naturalism, geocritics presumably had no particular position with respect to the use and abuse of space or place, apart from the fact the geocritics insisted that such uses were themselves meaningful.