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This essay both reflects upon ecocriticism's investment in cultivating environmental consciousness at a distance from critical reflexivity and explores its theoretical discontents. Arguing for the necessity of bringing theory into praxis, the essay suggests that ecocriticism needs to cross the threshold between discursivity and materiality, experience and representation.
Despite the strong impulse in the latest phase of ecocriticism to establish connections with the major theoretical paradigms in cultural and literary studies, "theory" is a contested issue in the ecocritical field. The main reason lies no doubt in the foundational objectives of ecocriticism. Since one of its central rationales was to "restore significance to the world beyond the page" (Rigby 154-55), ecocriticism confidently styled itself against the poststructuralist strand of contemporary literary theory that had conversely restored significance to the "word," resulting in the linguistic turn in the humanities. Ecocriticism's development as a project that conjoins environmental issues with the study of literature, however, is decidedly configured upon a pronounced reaction against this turn, and reflects itself in its investment in cultivating environmental consciousness at a distance from critical reflexivity. Although ecocriticism has opened a much broader front before us, with new directions of interdisciplinary research "into ecofeminism, toxic texts, urban nature, Darwinism, ethnic literatures, environmental justice and virtual environments" (Gifford 15), and with studies on numerous other socio-ecological topics, themes, and issues that demand special attention,1 it has diversified without making any recourse to the problems posed by the representations of the outside world in the text. That is why ecocriticism coheres, as Ursula Heise rightly concedes, "more by virtue of a common political project than on the basis of shared theoretical and methodological assumptions" (506). It produces various methodologies that diverge quite substantially in the ways in which they relate literary studies to the environmental humanities and sciences. Indeed ecocriticism's heterogeneity has become its identifying epithet. Apparently, a general picture of ecocriticism today resembles what Felix Guattari calls in The Three Ecologies a "processes of heterogenesis" (34). This term signifies "a becoming that is always in the process of adapting, transforming and modifying itself in relation to its environment" (95), a definition that applies well to the present expansion of ecocriticism in its pluralist orientations and inclusiveness. The heterogenous activity in the field...