Hello, my name is Stasha Cole and I will soon begin work on a dissertation about how nineteenth-century literature uses the mountain motif to promote eco-spiritual and eco-empathetic engagement with the organic ecology around humans and of which humans are a part. As a Ph.D. student in TU’s Department of English and Creative Writing, I teach a course on environmental rhetoric that helps my students conceive of and dismantle ecological myths as well as engage in environmentalist activism. I am also a graduate assistant at Nimrod International Journal where I get to read and help edit creative writing manuscripts of many styles. My own eco-poetry and place-based photography have been published in literary journals across the country.
If you can’t already tell, I’m most interested in ecological mythmaking: the ways in which humans over the course of millennia have conceived of the organic environment and their relationships with it and within it. Ernst Haeckel defined ecology using the Greek root “oikos,” meaning household. While today we might conceive of our household as the humans within our family unit, Ancient Greek practice would include a far less human-centered perspective. The household would include humans of all ages and classes, but it would also include livestock, domestic pets, wild animals, the land itself, the house itself, and all of the objects contained therein. Many historical figures (e.g. Aristotle, Aquinas, etc.) situate ecological elements within a hierarchy in which the higher rungs use the lower rungs as resources: this is a striking example of an ecological myth; many modern ecocritics have revived pre-enlightenment enchantment and indigenous animacy as worldviews that privilege the system in network rather than one of its component parts. Another example of ecological mythmaking appears in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which highlights how our language shapes our worldview. English is a noun-based language while Potawatomi is a verb-based one, meaning that the language itself recognizes and celebrates the animacy of the organic ecology. All of this is not to mention the ecological myth of the open frontier that underlies the foundation of the American Dream as it buries and erases the genocide of an unknown number of indigenous peoples. These questions are becoming increasingly vital in a political climate that prioritizes profit over preservation and silence over inquiry.
Each fellow in the Myth seminar gets to guide the OCH seminar for one week. As part of this work, I will discuss the myth of the straight line to problematize teleological and hierarchical approaches; Ursula K. LeGuin’s essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” will provide us with some fodder for thought. We will also use the introductory essay from Braiding Sweetgrass called “Learning the Grammar of Animacy” to inquire about the myth of noun-based language and how English excludes animate and biocentric perspectives. Finally, we will read excerpts from Adrian Harris’s “The Knowing Body: Eco-Paganism as an Embodying Practice” to encounter the myth of inanimacy and learn about some modern approaches to living with an appreciation of the affective organic environment.