Toward Sustainable Literacies: From Representational to Recreational Rhetorics (original) (raw)

2009, Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of …

. New York: Routledge, 2009. 202 -216. O chestnut-tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening dance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? ---William Butler Yeats, "Among School Children" I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance. ---Friedrich Nietzsche, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" In offering "some preliminary definitions" of ecocomposition, Sid Dobrin and Christian Weisser note that many scholars increasingly see identity as "shaped by more than social conventions and… influenced by our relationships with particular locations and environments" ("Breaking" 567). As a result, they see an opportunity for "how the two massive cultural projects of composition studies and ecology might inform each other" (567). Like one of their predecessors, Derek Owens, they talk about addressing "the current environmental crisis" not only by promoting pedagogies that understand environment or "place" as a critical category, but also by "identifying the ecological relationships between humans and surrounding environments as dependent and symbiotic" (574). Seen this way, ecocomposition is decidedly a move to address issues of sustainability within English studies. Because of an assumed symbiosis between human activity and environment, both are necessary for the continuation of the other. However, Owens and Dobrin and Weisser run into trouble when they attempt to spell out just how that relationship works. Broadly speaking, nature is kept separate from discourse and theorized mainly as a tool for representing external reality. Byron Hawk notes a similar concern in that Dobrin and Weisser "seem to be held back from pushing the concept of ecology to its