" However, in order to locate "the nonlinguistic material world" in Thoreau's writing, Newman draws upon an ecocritical literacy that remains ironically illiterate in its critical assumptions. In The Truth of Ecology (2003), Dana Phillips critiques ecocriticism for the problematic separation of the literal and the literary; Phillips reminds us that texts written or read from an ecological perspective may well be literal (or descriptive or realistic or naturalistic) in mode but can't avoid being literary in medium. (Phillips expands this irony to ecocritical theory's absolute resistance to the absolutism of theory.) Though I share Phillips's belief that "we need to cure ecocriticism of its fundamentalist fixation on literal representation," the larger theory and critique of ecocriticism of the sort he pursues is beyond my scope here. (8).
Rather, in paying greater attention to the sort of ecological literacy or, less anachronistically, the natural history writing and thinking that emerge in Emerson as it does in Thoreau, I will be arguing that both writers complicate the assumption that the literal and literary senses of things can be separated irreducibly in this way.
While ecocriticism of Thoreau and Emerson has thus tended to dichotomize ecology and imagination in terms of the empirical versus the metaphorical, and in the service of sharply distinguishing Thoreau's ecocentrism from Emerson's anthropocentrism, it has neglected a rhetorical middle ground, the empirical figure of expression known as metonymy that plays a significant role in the natural history projects of both writers. I begin with Emerson's exploration of the nature of metonymy in his later work to locate Emerson's poetics of nature writing beyond Nature. On my reading, Emerson has his own more empirical, late natural history projects, work also left largely unfinished and generally neglected by critics because it, too, was found wanting, as Robinson suggests of Thoreau's post-Walden work, by a "New Critical celebration" of "formal and symbolic achievement.
