Studies in Green: Teaching Ecological Crime Fiction

Abstract

Reading ecological crime fiction and reading crime fiction ecologically demands a shifting of focus to features of a text often dismissed backdrops to human activity: rivers, forests, landscapes, climate, or the planetary ecosystem. It provokes an adjustment of temporalities, urging students to situate human activity in seasonal, anthropological, evolutionary and deep time scales. Crime and detective fictions are inherently concerned with the ways in which ambiance, location, history and place-memory may be factors in crime and provide clues towards a mystery's solution. Every crime novel is set somewhere, and investigation of that somewhere is a good place to start introducing students to wider questions posed by ecological reading. What forms of knowledge are best suited to excavating obscured histories of a landscape, and how are past transgressions built into the fabric of a place? Is the environment active or passive, and what kinds of relationships do characters and other agencies form with the world in which crimes are commissioned, investigated and solved? With these questions as starting points, students can be encouraged to think beyond the immediate and engaging human dramas of crime fiction, and to begin to explore the roles that other-than-human factors and agencies play in human transgressions and the process of detection. Ecocriticism In order to support students through this process of refocusing attention on environmental and ecological themes, the forms of reading practised in crime fiction studies need to be brought into dialogue with the field of ecocriticism. An ecocritical reading, in the most general sense, approaches texts in two ways. Firstly, it reads any literary text with attention to the representation of the non-human world, including landscape, weather, flora, fauna and any other features commonly referred to as 'nature'. Secondly, any text that explicitly engages with environmental and conservation issues-for example, a work of nature writing focused on species decline-may be open to, or insist on, an ecocritical reading. Current trends in ecocriticism offer many specialised ways of approaching texts: for example, through