Abstract

As Ecocriticism gains increasing influence in literary and cultural studies, it faces serious questions about its relationships both with science and politics and with potential partners in feminist theory and postcolonial theory. While Ecocriticism has begun some tentative alliances, its practitioners confront a wide series of challenges that must be resolved before those relationships can evolve. Those challenges range from the deep epistemological divide that has developed historically between scientists and most social scientists and humanists to political questions about the relationship between analysis and action and the hegemony of traditional Western values. Whether ecocritics can marry science with traditions like the anti-technological strains in much postcolonial theory and among many radical environmentalists or mediate some common ground between a priori and a posteriori assumptions about the nature of truth may well define the future of what has become the most vital critical theory of the past two decades.