Scott's new book
In addition to teaching at the University of Nevada, Reno, Slovic spends time each year around the world, looking for new places for hiking and running and giving lectures to government, scholastic and public audiences about the importance of the environment.
Slovic recently finished his latest book, Going Away To Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. The book, published by University of Nevada Press, is a collection of his writing over the past decade dealing with ecocriticism, a term he believes conveys the balance between retreat and engagement that is essential, both in life and work. Going Away to Think also moved into new territory - the first essay tackles the issue of sustainability. Slovic taught a course on this issue and how it relates to literature, last spring and lectured on it this fall throughout China.
Slovic's book was featured in the September 15 issue of the Reno, News and Review
What's the book about? How did it come about?
This particular book is a compilation of a number of articles written over a decade or so. I write about six to twelve articles a year. It occurred to me that many of my projects over the years cohered. It also occurred to me that the paradigm of engagement and retreat was an ongoing process. I then selected from a few hundred, a handful of articles.
What sort of themes does the
book focus on?
An amount of my own work focuses on this
pattern of engagement and retreat. Eco-criticism and ecocritical responsibility, the latter a term I coined to suggest when a person makes a judgment about an ecologically sensitive topic or tries to put some distance between himself and the topic. To create a response in a positive way, to know when it's better to charge in or to sit back and think." There's a sense of one's
own involvement in the issues, not just art and writing for the sake of
beauty, but with an edge of politics. At the same time, it's also
concerned with literature, timeless things. For each person in the
field, the balance is different between engagement and retreat.
Can you elaborate on this idea of engagement
and retreat and how that relates to ecocriticism?
The basic
paradigm of the book is to explore through a series of essays how my
life as a writer, scholar, and teacher works as an ongoing negotiation
between the desire to appreciate life and the desire to act in support
of various social and environmental causes.
In the book, I establish a parallel between "savoring" (retreating from
political involvement in order to live deeply and explore experiences at
home and throughout the world) and "saving" (speaking up-or writing
letters-in order to protect people, species, places, and ideas that seem
to be in jeopardy). This is a pattern, some might say "a tension," that
is evident throughout American literature, certainly in the specific
branch of literature, environmental writing, that I've spent the past
quarter-century studying.
Even though I am primarily a teacher and a literary critic, I sense that the vacillating conditions of engagement and retreat operate in my own experience, too, not just in the lives and works of the writers I study. And this is what I've tried to reveal through the selected essay I've included in this new book.
I hope the book will inspire my students and colleagues-and other readers-to think about how they seek in their own lives to live responsively and responsibly. I realize that many people in the specific scholarly discipline known as "ecocriticism" (ecological literary criticism) may be particularly fascinated by seemingly apolitical aesthetic and philosophical issues (how do human beings understand their relationship with the rest of the planet?), but many people working in this field also find themselves inevitably entrenched in questions and debates-and many are trying to figure out how to balance their lives as thinkers and their lives as engaged citizens. This book seeks to model some of my own efforts to balance these modes of life.
What did you learn about yourself through the process
of going back through your work?
I think the earliest piece collected in this book is actually a brief
essay I wrote for a conference back in the fall of 1994-fourteen years
ago. Most of the essays were written during the past three years or so.
One of the things that occurred to me in looking back over so many years
(a period of time during which I've actually published more than 100
essays of various kinds) is how consistent my interests and concerns
have been over time. These days I actually live a rather frenzied life
of global travel, often going to Europe and Asia several times every
year, with trips to South America and even Africa. But I can see in some
of my essays from the mid-1990s my strong interest in "going away to
think" beginning to assert itself.
I guess I'm beginning to experience, in my own work as a literary scholar and as a person who tries to help organize an entire discipline of literary studies (by working with international colleagues to create scholarly organizations in the field of literature and environment and by editing the central scholarly journal in this field for the past decade and a half), what travel writer Pico Iyer calls "the global soul." This is somewhat ironic because many environmental writers and critics are interested in local experience-in what some call "bioregional thinking." I am certainly quite interested in the value of the local, but I am also intensely curious about far-away places and in experiencing new communities and landscapes-so I feel in my life and work a kind of push-pull tension between the so-called "lure of the local" (to quote Lucy Lippard) and the attraction of the exotic.