Skip Navigation


Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Advance Access originally published online on October 21, 2009
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2009 16(4):697-708; doi:10.1093/isle/isp096
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
16/4/697    most recent
isp096v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Robisch, S. K.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author(s) 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Woodshed: A Response to "Ecocriticism and Ecophobia"

S. K. Robisch

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

—Paul Valery, Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci

Just about halfway through Simon Estok's essay "Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia" for ISLE 16.2 ([Spring 2009]: 203–25), the piece finally becomes something like a work of literary criticism. Bookended with his battery of anxious questions regarding ecocriticism's arrival on the MLA stage (PMLA 114:5 [October 1999]), it seems that thesis-driven, evidence-supported literary analysis is not really Estok's major concern. Instead, he asserts and repeats a set of ideological presuppositions leading to the now all-too-predictable conclusion in academic journals that we just aren't "theorizing" enough. Within the first three pages Estok imagines that ecocriticism espouses "an immediacy and directness" and "an . . . [Full Text of this Article]


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?