Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :"Theorizing Material Ecocriticism"
Their [the material ecocritics] radical thesis is that in the age of environmental uncertainty, the natural and the cultural can no longer be thought of as dichotomous categories. Rather we need to theorize them together and analyze them together, and analyze their complex relationships in terms of their indivisibility and their mutual effect on one another.
Ah, another primary theoretical text. Serpy, you really know how to make our hearts sing. Anywho, this newfangled Material Ecocriticism movement can be a bit tricky to understand, so we'll unpack this quote using three simple formulas and a made-up novel narrative.
Here goes: say you're in line at the grocery store, and you decide to pick up the latest installment of Broseph McBroerson's frat house murder mystery series, Blood and Kegs Phi Delt. And in your free time, you decide to do a character analysis of the protagonist—the president of that chapter of the fraternity, Chip, and his mother, Mary.
Get those ecocritical brains a-turning, and let's begin.
Formula 1: Nature + Culture = Character
So, in Blood and Kegs, we have: (Twenty-one-year-old dude) + (beer, frat house, flip flops, sports enthusiasm, beautiful girlfriend) = the Phi Delt prez, Chip.
We know that our example's a bit stereotypical, and probably mildly offensive, but it's just an example. And we like making you laugh. Our point is this: the material ecocritic believes that to analyze any literary character, we must analyze both the nature of that character (a twenty-one-year-old human male), and the culture of that character (what he does in his natural habitat, such as beer ponging it up in his flippy floppies).
Formula 2: Nature – Culture ≠ Character
Importantly, when you take a character out of his prototypical cultural environment, he's not the same character anymore. If you wrest Chip out of Phi Delt, rob him of his beer keg and frat brothers and football and girlfriend, and stick him in his grandma's house on Easter Sunday, you'll likely see a much different guy emerge.
A material ecocritic says Chip's not the same Chip in this new environment. The culture of Easter Sunday at Grandma's interacts with the nature of his twenty-one-year-old male body to create a different outcome. Like, we're guessing Chip's actually quite a polite, upstanding dude when he interacts with his family… even if he enjoys the occasional keg stand back at his frat house.
Formula 3: Nature + Culture ≠ Character
Likewise, picking Chip's middle-aged mother out of her house and plopping her into Phi Delt won't turn her into Chip. Her nature won't respond to the culture of the frat house in the same way as that twenty-one-year-old man's body, so she cannot be considered a frat guy.
And maybe her nature will change the culture of the frat house itself—and when the brothers wake up the next morning, they realize their beloved fraternity has been turned into a bed-and-breakfast. A bed-and-breakfast where murders happen.
And Now, A Moment of Serious Clarity
Okay, so. Why is Material Ecocriticism important to lit crit? The message here is: don't judge a book by its cover. Because change the cover, and you change the book. A character isn't a character until you see him say and do things in a specific environment.
This movement also wants us to consider how the physical states of our authors affected the way they wrote. Herman Melville (can you tell we like Moby-Dick?) was a sailor. He wrote while he was at sea. And if you think about it, all those violent storms and seasickness would probably make most people produce some pretty wild prose.