interpretive conventions and instead seek new, dynamic, open-ended
paradigms for analyzing nature writing, paradigms that are developed
directly out of the principles they find within each text.^13 Otherwise,
nature writing will soon be just one more “area of specialization” on
the CVs of sinologists.
To reiterate, the scholar’s task ought to be, I argue, to strive for
forms of interpretation that recognize and valorize the irreducible,
unfathomable otherness of the nature writer’s subject—nature and
man’s relationship to the environment—while simultaneously bringing
to light what is original and insightful about a literary attempt to
breach or approach that lacuna. Analyses of nature as (discursive)
referent ought to alter or supplement our understanding of howand
whywe refer, denote, symbolize, and interpret.
The greatest difficulty in this enterprise lies, perhaps, in remaining
aware of what is lost when academia turns its established paradigms
onto the discursive product exclusively, as described in the scenario
above. For the academic enterprise can be “professional” in the most
pejorative Marxist sense of the word, in that texts and competitive
display of our mastery over them is often an end unto itself in literary
studies. No matter how humbling, it will remain imperative to police
the inception of Chinese nature writing into the academy,^14 censoring
from our own analyses anything that smacks of the careerist instru-
mentalization of texts that is often the ticket to publishing and confer-
ence venues.^15 We must instead strive to engage with and take up the
spirit of each individual nature writing text, even accept it as a direct
challenge to our established habits of interpreting and discoursing on
literary works. We must scrutinize how in—or out of—sync our
academic appropriations of nature writing are with the author’s and
the text’s relationship to nature. And, we must endeavor to tread full
circle, away from our computers and conference venues and back into
the source of all this discourse and textualizing—nature. Just as
cultural immersion is the gold standard for Chinese language studies, so
must natural immersion become the green standard and sine qua non
for scholars and students of nature writing.
In purely discursive terms, how then might one introduce into the
academic contextwritings that are deeply connected to and inspired
by nature, writings by people that communicate passion, compassion,
and concern for the environmental contextof which they write?^16 In
response to this apparent conundrum, this attempt to synthesize
two ostensibly opposed contexts, scholars must strive to sublate the
contradiction between the two, without attempting to resolve it. We
should attempt to treat nature writing as the kernel or residue of and,
90 Nick Kaldis