Save the Planet on Your Own Time? Ecocriticism and Political Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the paper, I try to consider the function of ecocriticism at the present time using insights taken, or derived, from the work of a loose group of scholars that is sometimes labeled as ‘neopragmatists.’ In particular, I shall be concerned with the points made by Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish to the effect that putting too much hope in the power of one’s academic discipline can be detrimental to the political tasks one wants to realize with its help. As Rorty argues, to effectively address any pressing political problem usually demands directly impacting the powers that be, which, as is safe to assume, is very unlikely to be achieved solely through books and articles in literary criticism. What one needs in such cases, Rorty tirelessly reminds us, is “real politics,” i.e., participating in demonstrations, supporting financially the political organization or party one finds the most hopeful, or writing letters of protest to officials. In order to see how these points apply to ecocriticism, understood as a subdiscipline of literary studies devoted to inquiring into “the relationship between literature and the physical environment,” I will begin by asking how that field can be useful in furthering the ecological cause, and will then turn to an example of an ecoritic’s engagement in “real politics.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".