Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cheryll Glotfelty's essay collection The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology was published in 1996, eighteen years after William Rueckert coined the term “ecocriticism,” and yet Glotfelty's main goal, through three hundred ninety-one pages and twenty-five essays, was still to answer the question “what is ecocriticism?”. Many of the essays included in the Reader are in direct conversation – if not outright argument – with one another and even today – sixteen years later still – “what is ecocriticism?” is a question with no easy answer. This is as it should be. As a discipline that is connected to literary theory by the dual bridges of culture and science – a culture that is becoming increasingly aware of its culpability in worldwide environmental destruction through the work of science – ecocriticism would be worse than useless if it was unable to reinvent itself in the face of this growing environmental awareness. It continues – appropriately – to adapt, not unlike the ecosystems that it discusses. But how does one define the parameters of a critical discourse that can't agree on its own tenets? I suggest that instead of searching for a definition of ecocriticism in the answers it provides, we look instead at the questions it asks. There are many, for certain, but a few stand out: the Big Questions that are the most repeated and that can often be glimpsed lurking behind many smaller inquiries. By enumerating these Big Questions and synthesizing some of the most important responses to them, I create an outline – a skeleton, if you will – upon which the muscles of ecocriticism can be seen to work. Extrapolating from this model, then, I critique the thesis of Timothy Morton's book Ecology Without Nature and through that critique suggest a constructive revision of Morton's idea of “ecology without nature,” a conceptual mode of responsible, ecological living that I label “nature as ecology.” Ultimately, this essay is both a critique of the current state of ecocritical discourse and an argument for a new, more constructive direction.
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 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 | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.079 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.032 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".