As is the case with personal criticism in general, ecocritical narrative scholarship is not without critics. In a 2004 essay in Environmental History, Michael Cohen characterizes some versions of narrative scholarship as a “praise-song school” of criticism, which, he argues, is “not sharply analytical but gracefully meditative.” Cohen claims that such scholarship is “fraught with dangers”: it too easily becomes “travelogue,” “clichéd,” or “sermonizing.” Two years later, Eric Ball accuses narrative scholarship of avoiding “many of the political aspects of environmental and ecological discourse.” Asserting that narrative scholarship “could only have come out of the U.S. tradition of nature writing and its related ecocriticism,” British academic Terry Gifford, a writer of narrative scholarship, points out that “this kind of writing is generally frowned upon in the United Kingdom with the suspicion that such personal narratives are probably too self-indulgent and uncritical.”29 Ouch.
Questions about the legitimacy of narrative scholarship affect not only ecocriticism, but also every discipline within the humanities. Any scholar concerned with the relationships among writer, text, and world must address issues related to the use (or not) of the personal in scholarly writing. In addition to literature and language studies, the disciplines of anthropology, history, and sociology struggle with the use of the personal in their scholarly practices.30 At a time when the humanities seek connections with wider audiences, personal criticism has emerged as a major form of outreach. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), for example, has been a runaway best seller.
Narrative scholarship should especially interest, and trouble, literary scholars, who now confront questions about the value of their work. Reporting about the 2009 convention session “Why Teach Literature Anyway?” the Chronicle of Higher Education observes that “one could argue that the real story of MLA 2009 was a quiet but urgent one: how literary scholars can justify what they do nowadays.”31 Writing about literature using a form all understand—narrative—is one way to go.
Fields of Play
Six chapters, plus a coda, follow. The literary texts I examine are from the region, or fit with the book’s themes, and they address issues that are both local and national in scope. The problems that people confront in northeastern Pennsylvania, including problems related to water quality, resource extraction, and waste management, are problems that confront people across the country. In Here and There, I examine not only how everyday nature gets represented in literature, but also how literature has helped me to understand my connections to home.
Confronting a natural gas rush in northeastern Pennsylvania, I think in chapter 1 about water, a central concern of many of my neighbors, who fear groundwater contamination. The chapter examines how the region treated its water sources in the past, and asks what it would mean to live with bad water. The landmark Pennsylvania Supreme Court case Pennsylvania Coal Company v. Sanderson (1886), Mary Austin’s sketches in The Land of Little Rain (1903), Robert Frost’s poem “A Brook in the City” (1923), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977) create a context for understanding how the Marcellus gas play may play out.
Chapter 2 acknowledges that to write about the region is to record trauma, both human and environmental. Miners faced the constant threat of injury or death; cave-ins, floods, fires, roof-falls, asphyxiation, and machinery accidents took their toll of lives and limbs.32 Although coal mining here has all but ended, strip mines still scar mountainsides, culm banks dominate former patch towns, and streams run stained with acid. Coal mining has irreparably damaged a quarter of the region’s 484 square miles; it’s no wonder that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines the Wyoming and Lackawanna valleys as a distinct ecoregion.33 Exploring how writers have represented this trauma, I use as points of departure the work of Scranton poets W. S. Merwin and Jay Parini; I read Merwin’s “Luzerne Street Looking West” (1956), “Burning Mountain” (1960), and “The Drunk in the Furnace” (1960) alongside Parini’s “Anthracite Country” (1982), “The Lackawanna at Dusk” (1982), and “A Lost Topography” (1988).
Thinking through how maps shape how we know a place, the third chapter, “Fixing Fence,” investigates the life of Jason Torrey, a central figure in Wayne County history, a Massachusetts man who first settled in northeastern Pennsylvania on land later owned by my family. In addition to the family connection, Torrey interests me because he worked as a surveyor, someone who created many of the property lines that we live with today, lines that a bioregional consciousness blurs, if not erases. In 1814, Torrey drew the earliest U.S. county property map that shows landownership.34 Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” (1914) helps me to think through issues raised by Torrey’s work.
“Barn Razing” meditates on the history of the farm by tracking the erection and erasure of its barns. Our dairy farm evolved in the mid-nineteenth century near enough to a rail line—initially laid to transport coal—to move from participating in a local market to contributing to the New York City milkshed, a fact manifested in the farm’s barn building. I end this chapter with a recounting of my razing of a three-story barn, on a Memorial Day, no less, that signaled a loss of this history.
“Other Places” argues that it matters where you learn. Within the context of my experiences as student and teacher, I wonder how different types of schools prepare people for the moral issues implied in land use. I place beside Marywood University, my nonprofit employer, the for-profit University of Phoenix and the Scranton-based International Correspondence Schools, which was founded to educate anthracite miners. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Robert Frost’s “The Pasture” (1914), a lyric that taught me how to see the land anew through poetry, which I define as a collection of other places.
The final chapter, “Rendering the Mounds of Home,” reflects on the Lackawanna Valley as a palimpsest of unstable ground: layers of mines that brought to the surface underground wealth now haunt people as an underground menace. Land subsidence, caused by the collapse of mine pillars, has long plagued the valley, a fact I explore in studying celebrated incidents in the context of the major U.S. Supreme Court case Pennsylvania Coal Company v. Mahon (1922). Not only is mine subsidence a metaphor for the region’s present economic instability—and the instability of all things—but so is strip mining, which mauled the valley from the 1920s to the 1970s. The underappreciated film Wanda (1970) and the Pulitzer Prize–winning play That Championship Season (1972) link these instabilities to ironies in the circulation of waste. Mining created mountains of inferior coal and slate. Once a chief supplier of fuel to East Coast cities, the Anthracite Region now imports the same cities’ municipal garbage, creating even more artificial mountains. (One local landfill runs excursion tours of its facilities.) Reflecting on the A. R. Ammons poem Garbage (1993), I place mine subsidence and mountain building within the context of current debates about what to do with the remains of our creativity.
The coda briefly examines reclamation and restoration projects at Marywood University to understand how people help to heal human-inflicted damage to the natural world. After reading Wendell Berry’s “The River Bridged and Forgot” (1982) as a way to reconceive our relationship to the rest of life, I end the book with a glance again at the gray dawn of natural gas drilling in northeastern Pennsylvania.
A major political force in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, a recent flashpoint in controversies over immigration, and a potential East Coast energy supplier (once again), northeastern Pennsylvania stands at a crossroads in its history. But it stands there perplexed, I believe, looking for a story that not only transcends but also incorporates the narrative of decline that others have pinned to it. As I look at my home, I