environment as possible, in keeping with Wallace and Armbruster’s
assertion that “Environment need not only refer to ‘natural’ or ‘wilder-
ness’ areas... environment also includes cultivated and built landscapes,
the natural elements and aspects of those landscapes, and cultural inter-
actions with those natural elements. One way ecocriticism can and should
widen its range of topics is to pay more attention to texts that revolve
around these less obviously ‘natural’ landscapes and human attempts to
record, order, and ultimately understand their own relationships to those
environments” (Wallace and Armbruster 2001: 1–25).
- (For a concise history, for example, see Wu 2004: 83–150; 196–217; and
especially 302–584). Wu’s magisterial survey reveals a thinker who is
deeply conversant with Western and Taiwanese (and [traditional]
Chinese) nature writing, environmentalism, and ecological theory. While
this type of book cannot avoid instantiating the academic incorporation
of nature writing, Wu’s is a highly self-critical, introspective, and princi-
pled attempt to preserve the unique ethical, intellectual, and creative
contribution of nature writing to established ways of knowing self and
world.
- For this reason, the present essay deliberately avoids discussion of the
numerous authors who have contributed to the development of Taiwan
nature writing, such as Xu Renxiu efg, Wang Jiaxiang hi祥, and
Hong Suliklm, among others. In my translating and interpretation of
Liu’s nature writing, I have attempted to elucidate the specificities of each
piece as well as a collective through-line (embodied, I believe, in the
“anxiety reflex” discussed below).
- Here and elsewhere, when referring to the academy, literary studies,
scholarly texts, I deliberately conflate these with Chinese literary studies,
the sinological community, and its scholarly texts. How the Western
academy determines and imposes interpretive and discursive paradigms
for studies of Chinese nature writing is a separate chapter of a larger
project of which the present essay is but one installment.
- Our dominant paradigms are paraded forth at nearly every literature
panel, often doing little more than demonstrating our intellectual self-
censorship and perpetual willingness to reinscribe the narrow boundaries
of the interpretive enterprise, rather than actually engaging the world to
which literature and its interpretation ostensibly refer. Note, for instance,
the jet and auto fuel/exhaust, the shameful heap of nonorganic, nonrecy-
clable detritus of plastics and styrofoam, uneaten food, wasted water, gas,
electricity, and paper generated by conference venues, a vast unaddressed
subtext looming over every panel, poster, roundtable, and paper pre-
sented (original version of present essay included), as scholars such as
myself passionately hold forth on topics like “nature as sovereign other.”
- For a fascinating argument that incorporates this passion for nature as
well as the irreducible otherness of nature as the basis for an environmental
ethics, see Mick Smith’s inspiring and erudite attempt to “trace a
conception of ethics as an excessthat can resist the rationalization and
“Anxiety-Reflex” and Liu Kexiang 101
