What We're Reading - English Department - College of Arts and Science

Ecological Literary Criticism:
Romantic Imagining and the
Biology of Mind
by Karl Kroeber

Review by Jonas Cope
Jonas Cope is a PhD student
specializing in nineteenth-century
British literature. Although his
Master's Thesis was a Freudian
reading of Middlemarch, he is
presently most interested in the
life, poetry and prose of Gerard
Manley Hopkins, as well as in the
integration of the ongoing study
of Latin, Old English and perhaps
other languages into 19th-century
studies.

What We're Reading

Most of us have heard of “ecocriticism,” that relatively new and peculiar method of literary analysis that came on the scene in the 1990s. Sometimes we hear about it and then forget it. I hadn’t given it much attention myself until recently, when I read Karl Kroeber’s Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (1994). As is the case with many ecocritical books, this one deals largely with English Romantic poets.

Kroeber’s work is revisionist, answering in a new way the old question as to why Romantic poets are so interested in nature writing. Certain other critics of Romanticism, Kroeber insists, offer only specialized, metaphysical explanations as to the Romantic preoccupation with the “union between intellect and nature” (Abrams), treating the Romantic poets primarily as inheritors and expositors of older religious and philosophical traditions—the values of which, of course, they make specific to their own poetic enterprises and secularized principles. Kroeber, on the other hand, says that we need not think of these men and women as divinely inspired poet-priests, as they often thought of themselves, but rather as scientifically intuitive persons who are often materialistic in their thinking. Their poetry can be read as a testament to the fact that they were scientifically precocious, specifically that they anticipated the interdependence of brain function and environment. Naturally, they hadn’t the scientific knowledge to formulate this proto-discovery yet, and so they used the language of the imagination instead. “Wordsworth’s profoundest discovery-creation,” Kroeber writes, “was that we dehumanize ourselves most perniciously when we use our consciousness to separate ourselves from nature,” and the separation is “disastrous because the natural environment is both the source and the primary sustainer of our singularly human power of consciousness.” At this point, the untrained reader expects an explanation from Kroeber as to the scientific veracity of what Wordsworth was getting at when he focused on this connection; in the last chapter of his book, a broad brushstroke of one recent advance in brain science, Kroeber legitimates Wordsworth’s (and others’) reaching ideas.

For Kroeber and the scientists whose works he engages, consciousness is a natural process. Brain function is regulated by environment, by “nature.” Popularizing the research of Nobel Prize winner and American biologist Gerald M. Edelman, Kroeber explains that, for Edelman, the self-conscious human brain constantly and uniquely interacts with its “spatiotemporal context,” with its social and natural surroundings, so that “The context for any one brain function…encompasses…the continuous changes in the ‘outside’ environment with which the brain engages.” Importantly, the entry of perceptions into the brain is a “selectively constructive” function, not merely “a responsive one” (i.e., our brains are not passive, responding computers but self-enhancing organs for which to function is to interact). Consciousness, like the natural world, is self-transforming: “perceptions and organizings of perceptions can be continuously reentered into the process of intercommunicative activity [into activity among the brain’s many “neural maps”] in a variety of ways, continuously, phasically [discontinuously], recursively.” In other words, the brain processes and continues to process phenomena slightly differently, always changing the way it functions according to its changing environment. What this implies is that if our self-conscious minds, as well as the infinite cultural constructs that are inevitably produced by them and them alone, are actually inextricable from, interdependent with, in part the product of, our “environment,” then it is no wonder that some Romantic poets were so interested in nature, that they felt themselves “formed” by it—literally, their brains were (and ours are).

The book is a lot less scientifically dense as my (highly rugged) synopsis of its last chapter suggests, but Kroeber does want to connect the humanities with the so-called “hard” sciences. Most of his book demonstrates how “proto-ecological” the thinking of the Romantic poets was. While more recent ecocriticism (i.e., Timothy Morton‘s 2007 Ecology Without Nature) wants to dispense with the idea of “nature” altogether (since, for Morton, poetry about it ends up being a reproducible commodity of carefully chosen rhetoric, indicating that there is no actual thing “out there” we can safely take comfort in and respond to and call “nature”), Kroeber keeps the concept alive and accounts for a very unique understanding of it on the part of poets who wrote two centuries ago—a sophisticated understanding, true, but one that, so far as this book is concerned, the lay reader can understand and appreciate with or without a scientific background.