Department of English

The Myth of the Organic Community: Environment and Cultural Identity in the Modern British Novel

Professor Doryjane Birrer
Larissa (Lacey) Brian and I were able to combine our literary and environmentalist interests in an SURF project that involved ecocriticism, or “Green Studies,” which is in part dedicated to exploring the relationship between nature and culture.  Our focus was on literary visions of the “organic community,” a lost English folk culture in which humanity and nature coexisted harmoniously, and in which rural villagers shared a sense of group identity and understanding that transcended their individual circumstances.  Such visions share a nostalgia prevalent in the work of English cultural critics who write of idyllic lifestyles in the English countryside in tandem with an “authentic” English culture that has slowly and tragically been lost to the English people.  As a counter to such visions, our SURF project explored the ways in which a significant number of contemporary British novels ironically expose such myopic visions of the organic community as fabrications that, for example, obscure the realities of rural labor, sanction the patriarchal and classist aspects of the organic community, overlook the ecological impact of agrarian practices, and elide the ways in which landscape and rural heritage have been employed ideologically in the service of oppressive ideologies and commodified in the service of pure market capitalism. 

Aside from background reading in ecocriticism, our research primarily involved collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing a substantial and disparate body of materials—verbal and visual, literary and cultural—that helped us to establish connections among depictions of rural English culture, the organic community, and the natural environment.  We ultimately used our research to shape a paper that we co-presented at an ecocriticism conference in Lincoln, England.  Our research and our experience at the conference will help inform Lacey’s ecocritical bachelor’s essay and her future work as a grad student, and will help render my own scholarship and pedagogy more environmentally conscious.

Larissa Brian
Over the summer, one could most likely find me at Kudu coffeehouse researching the “myth” of the organic community in relation to contemporary British literature as part of a SURF grant that Dr. Birrer and I received.  With my laptop, a latte, and an array of critical theory books, I would spend hours reading about ecocriticism as well as cruising the internet for British tourism and environmentalist websites pertaining to current ecological efforts being made in England.  Toward the end of the summer, we came to the conclusion that there is still in fact a pervasive nostalgia in England to return to a simpler, more idyllic way of life, a “Golden Age” that never truly existed.  This idea became the impetus for our conference paper on the trope of human dwelling in nature and how several contemporary British novels portray this obsession with an idealized past as misguided.  We also argued that idealizing the past is a distraction to environmental engagement with the present (inevitably linked to the future).

The ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) conference at the University of Lincoln in England focused on ecocritical discourse of the 21st century in areas related to landscape, animal studies, postmodernism, and pedagogy (to name just a few topics).  Being the only undergraduate student there, I really had the chance to absorb the intellectual atmosphere and to listen to discussions among ecocritics like Greg Garrard, Robert Kerridge, and Terry Gifford—all of whom I had encountered in secondary texts that I had read over the summer.  It was amazing to watch my research come to life in such a scholarly world, particularly in the way that it opened my mind to a deeper/broader understanding of ecocriticism and the critical contexts and conversation surrounding it.  I would like to thank Dr. Birrer, the SURF program, and the College of Charleston for this experience and for awarding me the opportunity not only to combine my ‘tree hugger’ and literary passions via ten weeks of intensive research, but also to travel to England and participate in an academic realm normally reserved for graduate students and professors.