Revisioning Nature

Chair: Sophia David

“The Challenges posed by Antipodean Wildlife.” by Joan Price

Shipwreck survivors and buccaneers first described Antipodean wildlife. In 1770 the scientific party with Captain Cook were astounded by the flora of Australia; but their descriptions followed the conventions of Linnaean classification. Whilst HMS Endeavour was repaired, the starving men ate most of the birds and animals they caught. They returned with a pickled ‘kangaru’, some remnants, and a huge herbarium. The lavish Floregium that was planned was only published in its entirety in 1980. As a result, other botanists on French and British voyages of exploration received the credit. Initially the platypus was thought to be a fake, and it took years to prove that it lays eggs, like the echidna. The islands east of the Wallace Line share similar strange fauna, and New Zealand had no land mammals. Neo-colonialism now extends to biology, and the virtues of the indigenous wildlife and the cooperative nature of their evolution are being appreciated. A study of the historical scientific records can tell us something of the long term results of aboriginal land management. They also provide a point from which to measure the effects of exploitation, mis-management, the introduction of non-indigenous species and global warming on these most fragile of environments

“Nature Fakers: Science, Literature and the Realistic Wild Animal Story.” by Candice Allmark Kent

As Charles G. D. Roberts (1860-1943) stated in the preface to Kindred of the Wild (1902), “it is with the psychology of animal life that the representative animal stories of to-day are first of all concerned” (16). He was describing the ‘realistic wild animal story,’ a genre he co-created with fellow Canadian author Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946), which was an attempt to blend science and literature in the exploration of animal psychology. Significantly, the authors saw this communication as reciprocal: they used scientific discourses to create ‘accurate’ depictions of animal experience, but also saw the author’s empathetic imagination as able to explore further than scientific observations or experiments alone. Their work has faced heavy criticism however, both at the time of publication in a debate known as the Nature Fakers controversy, and in recent ‘literary animal studies’ scholarship. I contend that the perception and reception of the realistic wild animal story must be understood in the context of the changing relationship between science and literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, and as such, could be used as a case study for research in this area. Nonetheless, in discussions of science and literature or the ‘two cultures divide,’ the realistic wild animal story has been almost entirely forgotten.

"Questioning Fact and Figuration in the Poetry of Charles Tomlinson and Nature Writing Pedagogies.” by Isabel Galleymore

Although Dana Phillips and David W. Gilcrest recognise that ecocriticism’s focus upon nonfictional texts jeopardises the literary nature of nature writing, they continue to advise nature writers to become ‘bell-like instruments and empty vessels’. Whilst such an approach supposedly negates the self to generate ecocentric writing, this paper will question such an assumption and seek to redress the similar assumption that metaphorical approaches to nature writing are egocentric endeavours.

To do so, this paper will explore contemporary nature writing pedagogies that prompt factual relationships with the environment. This prescriptive quality within the pedagogies will then be compared to the reflexivity in Charles Tomlinson’s poetry that interrogates the act of observation with regard to the environment. Tomlinson’s early collections value a poetics that displays a ‘mental fibre beneath the elegance’. However, whilst Tomlinson is faithful to fact, his poetry is simultaneously curious of the boundaries associated with fact and figuration. Negotiating recent pedagogical theories that environmental commitment depends on factual knowledge, David Orr’s discussion of ‘personhood ’radicalises assumed definitions of fact and figuration in the light of experiential learning. This then helps to introduce Tomlinson’s prospect of becoming ‘more human’ as an ecocentric, rather than egocentric, prospect.

Consequently it becomes clear that despite Tomlinson’s appeal to fact, a ‘figurative scaffold’ is at work within his writing and remains key to engagement between self and environment. Whilst helping to critique certain pedagogies, this conclusion will touch upon the larger discussion of the ‘poetic texture’ of perception and metaphor as ‘not something we can stand outside.’