Natura Naturans and the Organic Ecocritic: Toward a Green Theory of Temporality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
If ecocriticism has been a form of scholarship that is integrated with an activist practice, that activism has most often taken the form of rhetorical appeals to conservation and to valuation of a specific place (or “place” as such), a species, or even a privileged mode of representation such as the pastoral, the work of the bioregionally-grounded poet, or green themes in middlebrow novels (Garrard, 2005). Ecocriticism-as-advocacy assumes a particular view of time. An active present is taken as a means of forestalling an undesirable future, with little account for the past; the critic is in a race against time to explicate the water images in this or that poem, and heated debate concerns the limits of an appropriate canon for such an enterprise . Meanwhile, historically-informed and materialist approaches to ecocriticism, have been proposed, which look to the past as a field of determinations and limits on the present: the present as the given product, finished or not, of past causes . Both these approaches, and the Utopian mode—so promising in its ability to imagine a positive political program in addition to the earnest advocacy we already have of the conserve this and care for that type—are all predicated on two unspoken and contradictory a priori: time as a matrix of causality, and hence the objects of time as legible in space in the present, on one side; time as a transhistorical and transcendent Now of reflection and contemplation or another. The former, in that it supports a view of nature as a time-produced and time-bound formation vulnerable and impermanent in its complexity, is appropriate to an activist stance as something to defend; the latter predicates a certain kind of criticism, specifically a detached and aesthetically-oriented gaze. Both positions have merit. However, neither is wholly or solely adequate, and there remains between them a conceptual tension if not contradiction between the political and critical engagements characteristic of ecocriticism since the 1980s.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".