Natural’s Not in It: Postcolonial Wilderness in Steffler’s The Grey Islands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SINCE ITS INITIAL publication in 1985, John Steffler’s collection of poems, The Grey Islands, has earned a reputation as a classic work of wilderness writing, one that should sit, as its dust jacket proclaims, “beside the works of Thoreau, Annie Dillard, and Aldo Leopold.” While reading The Grey Islands as a work of wilderness writing aligns it with a distinctive, ecologically-minded tradition, it also brings, perhaps unfairly, the attendant theoretical stigma occasionally associated with that tradition to bear on Steffler’s work. Positing him as a wilderness writer emphasizes the primacy of ecological concerns in the book, but it also risks reiterating the anthropocentric notion of nature as the a priori source of individual human redemption. In such a reading, nature becomes the unmediated origin from which the liberal humanist subject affirms his or her integrity, and upon which he or she asserts authority. Reading Steffler in this manner risks not only asserting a logic of domination that exalts the primacy of human rationality above ecological passivity, it also posits Steffler as a poet invested in maintaining the illusion of a stable lyric self at a time when such claims to subjective integrity were being routinely subverted by postmodern critical concerns. This paper proposes a reading of The Grey Islands that bridges its ecocritical concerns with postcolonial theory. Conventionally, postcolonial theory and ecocriticism have represented distinct, and in some cases incompatible, critical approaches. While postcolonial theory has proven itself potent by exposing and often deconstructing the provisionality of imperialist rhetoric in colonial and neocolonial discourses, ecocriticism has often sought firmer ontological ground by examining the ways in which human affairs are regulated by their relation to a stable natural environment. The Grey Islands, by attending simultaneously to issues of postcolonial identity and ecological awareness, affirms a space in which
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".