I am a peripheral figure: a compositionist specializing in nature writing. I wrote a dissertation on the genre then went looking for work in my field, and I can imagine the quizzical, dismissive looks that greeted my vita as it landed on one stack of rejects after another. Less my research topic than my teaching record, I suspect, opened such doors as allowed me to explain this seeming anomoly in my professional identity. And explain I did: not a single interview unfolded that did not begin with the question, How does your dissertation relate to composition?

My explanations must have sufficed at the time, for mine is a success story after all, having culminated in the WPA post I now hold. But I would like to compose a fuller, more detailed reply to the question, since it occupies me at least as much as it may have puzzled employers, and the answer bears upon more than my own prospects. I want to commend to compositionists the object of my study, discussing not my research per se so much as the relations of that work to our field, and highlighting some aspects of my attention to it as signified in the typographical oddity with which I've entitled this essay: namely, the slash mark that both separates and renders continuous those two loaded terms, "nature" and "writing." Of the grounds for this idiosyncracy, more apace; for now, let's take the phrase "nature writing" as conventionally depicted, the two words separated by a space and joined in a single generic appellation.

Composition itself is a single appellation, but one that is variously construed. How I represent my concern with nature writing as belonging to composition will imply a view of what composition is or incorporates, and that, obviously, is in flux. Whether it is, as Janice Lauer has it, a "dappled discipline," or piebald, or molting, or exploded, there is no question but that a great many rings of various prominence occupy the big top of our collective attentions. One test as to whether a subject or pursuit belongs within this enclosure can be readily evoked: an appeal to precedent. What's done in a field is what's been done. Thus the short answer to the question I've posed: composition has long shown an interest in something called "literary nonfiction," and nature writing is a variant thereof. Take, for instance, Chris Anderson's two books or Ross Winterowd's book on the subject, or the several CCCC conference sessions held each year on modes or genres or practitioners of belletristic prose. Nature writing's status within composition, then, hinges first on a larger boundary problem. If nothing else, these efforts attest to the fact that some compositionists feel licensed to perform literary analysis of the sheerest sort if the objects of their performances are not demonstrably lies.

But what besides the ethos of the participants, their professional identity as writing teachers, do these efforts have to recommend them? A standard response is that this is the sort of writing--the essay, especially, personal or informational--that a great number of us teachers exhort our students to produce, and so it behoves us to comprehend its operations. On its face, this sentiment seems unexceptionable, and my own work can be regarded as contributing to this project. Such efforts might even be thought to promote the transcurricular reconfigurations of composition, literature, and other disciplines that Anne Ruggles Gere terms a "restructuring" of disciplinary relations--a characterization Gere offers in contrast to prevailing metaphors of bridging or borrowing, which continue to stress the separate, static character of the disciplines engaged in such discursive trade (1-3). Attending to such writing, composition enters a claim on the "literary" without giving itself over to literature or resigning itself to separate but equal status. A problem arises if the attention paid to literary nonfiction does not so much restructure as it does recapitulate our traditional relations with literary studies. The intricacy and dash of literary analysis may be mistaken for pedagogical effect, the upshot tending to reinforce prevailing splits between the author's, the critic's, the teacher's and the student's productions of meaning--splits upon which composition's separate status is largely founded and that attention to nonfiction texts might be expected to address. Much work in this vein, for instance, focuses on the individual creations of single, exceptional literary practitioners, and while the interest of such interpretive performances may be manifest, their pertinence to practices of composition may not be. A pedagogy based on such a critical practice may as much as reproduce the conditions that, according to Gary Tate, led to the banishment of literature--i.e., fiction and poetry--from the writing classroom in the first place. It may lead, that is, to bad teaching, upon terms we have since embraced.

None of this is to argue that critical attention to individual authors and texts ought not to be paid or that it must result in flawed pedagogies, only that in itself, it cannot be sufficient to the purposes compositionists hold for attending to literary nonfiction. A "restructuring" of composition and adjacent disciplines would rather incorporate revised critical practices in fulfilling these purposes, in effecting a rapproachment between the texts students consume and those they produce. One such approach is found in the apologia for teaching nonfiction offered by Phyllis Frus (formerly McCord), who takes a poststructuralist tack to compromise the distinction between literature and nonfiction. The main obstacle to a reconception of nonfiction as literature, Frus holds, is a tacitly positivist attitude that holds nonfiction to be "a reflection of an objective reality" in a way fiction is not. Nonfiction would be offered toward the end of "teaching students the fallacy of regarding nonfictional prose as tied to the world; even so-called factual or objective writing is creative of the reality it presents and does not represent the world itself." The benefit of exposing this "fallacy," according to Frus, will be enhanced student awareness of writing process and willingness to "experiment." With "the world itself" permanently on hold, the pressure on students presumably will be off.

This approach does indeed bode to compromise distinctions between categories of texts, but it does so at the cost of rendering all discourse fictional and thus "literary" alike. Made thus all-subsuming, the categories of "fiction" and the "literary" must both lose efficacy, in the absence of anything to which they may be counterposed. The approach I favor is roughly the reverse of that Frus describes; I propose it for reasons I will come to call ecological. To my mind, this endless bracketing of "the world itself" outside of language, this perfect confidence in the "fallacy" of textual reference (a stance which itself assumes a privileged vantage upon validity), this emphasis on the "created" character of literature in contrast to what Frus terms "actuality," as if created things were not actual: all this seems mainly to reinscribe the split Frus seeks to bridge in her teaching. A category of the actual still haunts this discourse, only all of language is shunted to its further side. The problem to my mind is not that "nonfiction" is thought to be "tied to the world" but that "fiction" is thought to be not so "tied"--assuming, that is, that the "world" is figured not as a positivist realm of objective substance but as the realm of dailiness, mediated understanding, a world inhabited, not escaped from or stepped away from, through story and song. In teaching literature and writing, I would rather begin with and build upon our ordinary senses of report and testament--the "true saying" that students assume with good reason will be their stock-in-trade and that most of our critical, scholarly methods depend upon--and progress toward the "actuality," the prerogatives and repercussions, of the irreal, mythical, incongruous, extravagant, "made up." I have no interest in courting my students' disbelief.

Yet I'm not alone in agreeing with Frus on the need to question distinctions between something called "literature" and something that is not. Such questioning seems integral to any restructuring of composition and its disciplinary cohorts. It is pursued in many quarters, an influential one being found in Textual Power by Robert Scholes, with its scathing characterization of literature as those texts that academics favor and consume, distinct by definition from the "pseudo-non-literature" produced by students and consumed, in effect, by no one (5-6). In place of literary study (or worship) per se, Scholes proposes a course of interpretation and criticism of texts in general, a general education-style hermeneutic of suspicion to be positioned in the curriculum where such required courses as Freshman Comp and Intro to Lit now stand.

I will return to Scholes' reasons for recommending such a change, as they bear on my own purposes. Scholes' pedagogy, it's worth mentioning, still depends on readings of fictional works, which he does not theorize as distinct from nonfiction but in practice prefers as objects for text work. More pertinent to the objects of my own study are accounts that, with Todorov, find the category of "literature," as opposed to nonliterature, both structurally and practically insupportable, and subvert that category by recourse to notions of genre, to "a typology of discourses" all of which "deserve our attention on an equivalent basis" (11). This equivalence of attention among genres portends a disciplinary restructuring similarly marked by equivalence among parts, with nature writing, I will suggest, not a bridge but potentially a linchpin in a revised curricular dispensation.

For composition studies, Amy J. Devitt has synopsized the transdisciplinary strands of recent thinking about genre in her article, "Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept." For the emerging view Devitt describes, genre, far from being a static collocation of textual traits, is a "dynamic patterning of human experience" (573). Genre is generative: generic identity is not determined by but determines and defines aspects of the text under production. Genre not only responds to but creates contexts: "the act of constructing the genre--of creating or perceiving the formal traces of a genre--is also the act of constructing the situation" (578). Per Devitt, this conception of genre ramifies widely for composition, heralding the dissolution of dichotomies of many sorts, including those between form and content, text and context, process and product, and individual and social roles in composing (573). It can further contribute to our understanding of how writers formulate goals and how they go about revising their texts. Indeed, both Devitt and the literary theorist Adena Rosmarin remark on the resemblance of genres to such cognitivist categories as "schemata" and "models"--not as Platonic ideals but as pragmatic tools for understanding, both formulated from and constitutive of the needs of those who employ them.

With this conception of genre and with Devitt's account of its implications, I close in on the precepts of my own study and can begin to characterize it in terms more particular than those I have used to this point. I have said that my subject is nature writing, and one of my points of departure concerns what sort of generic identity the writing so entitled can be said to possess. After all, the various sorts of texts lumped under this heading run the gamut of any discourse taxomony, any parsing of modes or manners you care to apply. Works called nature writing may be kin to hard science or cousins to spiritual exercises, may be field guides or farm journals, camping lore, sagas of exploration, or metaphysical speculation.¹ Works in this vein may freely blend generic types, flaunting the insufficiency of some modal categories to accomodate, much less help generate, written texts. And yet "nature writing" as a generic imprimatur still retains a certain integrity, especially in the estimation of its consumers. As Morris Dickstein has noted, "Popular reading is essentially rereading, the pursuit of a known quantity, a familiar experience" (35), and Hans Robert Jauss has extended this observation to the realm of genre, claiming that the mode of reception of genre fiction is such that it operates not so much within as between works. Its meaning depends on repetition of a particular reading experience (144): if you've read just one mystery you can hardly be said to have read a mystery at all. It seems to me that whatever generic integrity may be claimed for nature writing similarly depends upon repeated reading experience, from which springs a certain familiarity and set of generic expectations. These expectations do not depend solely upon a text's having nature as its "subject"--whatever that means--any more than every story containing mystery qualifies as a "mystery." Instead, it seems to me that readers of nature writing, like those of popular fiction genres, seek out repeated instantiations of a certain core story, and it's this I am concerned to delineate.

I am concerned, then, with narrative in nature writing, and the core story I am positing is one I call the narrative of retreat. Narratives of retreat--or more colorfully, dramas of solitude--relate a writer's movement away from human society toward a state of solitude in nature. Such stories are far from peculiar; they depend upon, they articulate, narrativize, or as Kenneth Burke would say, "temporize" a key dichotomy in Western culture generally and in our national history particularly--that between nature and culture--and so they are widely told, by students and published writers alike. I am interested in the operations of a "narrative logic" of retreat consonant with the nature-culture opposition: a logic, in short, which stipulates that the fit resolution to a story of "losing the human" comes in the recognition that the human has been lost and a place and/or condition of nonhuman nature attained. This is a narrative imperative variously honored in works of nature writing, one with a number of implications that I cannot here detail.

One important implication, though, concerns the relations between genre--and I believe it is obvious how narrative logic is implicated in the notion of genre I have described--and the actions of readers and writers. A generic account of a passage from culture to nature--a walk in the woods, let's say--is likely to enact the logic, to assume the broad narrative contours I have sketched. It is likely to commence in cultural precincts, make an issue of the transition, and culminate in some recognition of the natural character of the place. But similarly, the passage itself--the walk, the trip, the particular observation--is likely to be undertaken, indeed to be motivated by, the generic expectations this narrative logic entails. The walker sets out in the landscape, and the story of that walk will be the joint production of what is expected, on one hand, and the expectation of something unexpected, on the other--the expectation that recognition, significance, fulfillment of a certain order will ensue. It is the expectation of action in Hannah Arendt's sense of activity pursued toward the end of its own narratibility, its repetition in stories formative of the identity of the doer (cited in Ricouer, 183). The consequences of this formulation are significant, I think, both for the composing of texts extending from such actions--not just narratives, either, but description or exposition that dwells on the place/condition recognized as "eventful"--and for the analysis, revision, and comparison of such texts.

I would even propose that as a "literary" genre, nature writing holds if not a unique than at least a concentrated relation to the tangible actions of both readers and writers. One prominent practitioner of the genre, Gary Paul Nabhan, claims, "the trick of nature writing is to stimulate the reader to put the book down" (Lueders, Writing Natural History, 74). This seems the reverse of what most "literary" writing aspires to, its intent to fixate or "entrance" the reader. The book is to be abandoned not out of boredom or distraction but out of a renewed attention, we might even say conversion, in the expectation that the reader will go and do likewise: compose, perhaps even inscribe, some kindred action of her own.

On this note, we can revisit the matter broached above: the grounds for depicting nonfiction as literature. If the distinction between literature and nonliterature hinges, as Scholes says, on the notion that literature is exactly that which students do not produce, then one way of softening the distinction might be to find ways to represent the activities of students and literary artists as essentially the same. But it is not so simple to establish this similitude in the realm of style or thematic complexity, textual effects which students may be hardpressed to duplicate with anything like the eloquence of the models erected for their delectation. This is hardly a new argument: it was the grounds, in some degree, for composition's (partial) abandonment of literature or course reader pedagogy in the first place. But it seems reasonable to claim likenesses in the realm of lived situations, of the actions a person has taken or might take, and the ways these are repeated or represented--or "converted"--in texts. To view not only the texts but the actions themselves as constructed or composed is not to sever their connection from "the world itself" but to establish conditions for their coming into being at all. This, at any rate, is the lesson--the moral, if you will--that I derive from a certain strain of narrative theory best exemplified by Paul Ricouer in his reflections on "narrative time"--and also by the nature writer Barry Lopez in his useful essay, "Landscape and Narrative."³

Of course, such precepts as these need not eventuate in a pedagogy employing nature writing at all, though the genre has advantages for the purpose. The personal essay or any stylistically-heightened form of reportage might similarly highlight issues of literariness and the constitution of lived experience. Why depart from or resort to nature writing in particular, then? My reasons can be inferred from my title, in the way the word "ecology" is positioned between "literature" and "composition" as if to suggest an intermediate or mediating role. In ecology, I feel, we encounter an integrated realm of practical, political, philosophical, and rhetorical concerns that can help us--at least those of us whose allegiances the term may entitle--to restructure our disciplinary practices. And nature writing, in turn, bears a special relationship to ecology. My mention of Barry Lopez provides a way to broach this relationship. In a remark much seized upon by students of the genre, Lopez has speculated that nature writing "will not only one day produce a major and lasting body of American literature, but . . . might also provide the foundation for a reorganization of American political thought" (Halpern 297). This remark, this vision of political transformation, might be thought to signify little more than the literary artist's recurring dream of social efficacy. But in its way, it exemplifies the relations between textual productions and political dispensations that much critical energy has been expended to explore in recent years, in both literary and composition studies. Thus if we take Lopez's suggestion seriously, it seems we may find in nature writing an ecological tack on the highly-charged question of political "content" in the writing classroom.

Within certain marginal but energetic corners of literary studies, moves have been afoot for some years to promote ecological concerns, to establish a practice of what the Burke scholar William Rueckert first termed "ecocriticism" or what Joseph Meeker has called "literary ecology."⁴ According to Meeker, literary ecology studies the biologically adaptive function of literary production; it involves, in part, "an attempt to discover what roles have been played by literature in the ecology of the human species" (9). Composition as a field has not been quick to pick up on the program that this statement suggests, though the past few years have seen many encouraging developments.⁵ It seems to me that we in composition and literacy studies might think about broadening Meeker's agenda, assessing the ecological impact, the adaptive characteristics of textual production generally, and extending our considerations to include the realm of lessons, assignments, student texts, even the spatial and temporal dispensations of schooling, which are equally generic, equally composed. We might do so not as a litmus test of environmental propriety nor as a determining, foundational narrative of the ways things have been and must be from now on, but as an orientation, a pragmatist vantage point, a Burkean "metabiology" embraced and cultivated in the expectation, though without the assurance, that it will prove beneficial to us and the creations we depend on. For as Burke says, "Orientation can go wrong"; "the world itself" is not just constituted by but rises to contest our versions thereof.⁶

To gloss this suggestion, I return to an item I passed over earlier, namely, the reasons Robert Scholes gives for recommending for incoming students a course in a hermeneutic of suspicion. Such a revised curriculum, Scholes asserts, follows upon "drastic changes in the needs of our constituents," namely our students, who "now exist in the most manipulative culture human beings have ever experienced," yet are ill-prepared in either skill or knowledge to make sense of the incessant manipulation (15). I endorse this assessment but cannot see where Scholes suggests to what ends or in the service of what this manipulation ought to be resisted, unless manipulation is an ill in and of itself. Yet why shouldn't our students reject the notion that they are manipulated, or even accept and join in on the manipulations if they perceive that their interests will be so served? A commitment to a democratic polity or to social and economic justice, I fear, must strike many as ineffable, just as arbitrary or falsely "foundational" as anything else when couched in a hermeneutic that figures most every cultural arrangement as arbitrary. Why buy this set of ultimate terms? Why not bet on a winner, the no less arbitrary but arguably more durable and profitable discourse of the dominant culture? Yet the fact is that this "most manipulative culture" of ours is also, and not by coincidence, the most rampantly destructive of life and landscape that humans have yet devised, for reasons inseparable from considerations of social justice yet demonstrable in the most stringent and principled material terms. This culture's manipulations are both rhetorical and grossly substantial, manifest in the operations of bullhorn and bulldozer alike. And from the vantage of ecology, they are in no one's interest, demonstrably so. These facts, conducing to commitment, belong with the knowledge that Scholes says must buttress rhetorical skill. It seems to me that Scholes' textual studies teaches suspicion but stops short of allegiances. To Jameson's slogan, which Scholes embraces--"Always historicize!"--I would append "Always natural-historicize!" or "Always prehistoricize!" so that, in debunking a reverence for texts, we do not end up revering suspicion alone.

I am far from pretending that nature writing is sufficient to such purposes. In fact, I imagine that an enduring alleviation of our ecological concerns--not their ultimate solution, since such concerns will certainly be a condition of human existence from now on--will depend at last upon a dissolution of the nature-culture split, at which point anything called "nature writing" must likewise dissolve, and happily so. (Something like this understanding, I think, led Gary Snyder to entitle his collected poems, No Nature.) I will return to this proposition when I close this essay with a gloss on the slash mark in its title. But if not sufficient I believe that nature writing can yet be productive for the purposes cited, and I will list some reasons for this belief.

I offer first a relatively modest claim, namely that nature writing as a genre enacts the sort of interdisciplinarity that many in our field seek to promote. The genre arises at the junction of the "arts and sciences," that pairing of putative opposites by which the college I work for, like so many others, is entitled. Its historical origins are found in the precursors to so-called "hard sciences" and the descendents of spiritual autobiography, among other generic sites. Accordingly, it offers a wealth of curricular opportunities, ways to dramatize in writing and other actions the traffic across these boundaries. A while ago, for instance, I gave a talk about nature and narrative to a small cross-curricular program called the Natural History Writers Project, a program stressing environmental research, cultural studies, and writing, pursued on site at a biological research facility on a lake in Michigan. I hope that a thousand such transcurricular flowers will bloom, and I envision a role for nature writing in effecting the connections such efforts are after.

One aspect of this role would be to explore the relative presence and function of the "personal" in both disciplinary discourses and informal, "efferent" writing alike. A host of issues present themselves: distinctions between reporting, confiding, emoting, concealing, or effacing aspects of one's person in prose. Take Thoreau, for instance, by most accounts the genre's originary figure. A critic of science who nonetheless conducted empirical studies, an inveterate journalizer whose familial and professional relations find next to no place in his writing, Thoreau in certain ways exemplifies a mix, even a clash, of generic expectations, even as he virtually personifies the genre of retreat. Or there is Ann H. Zwinger, a prominent contemporary nature writer, who in correspondance with the compositionist Carl H. Klaus has adamantly resisted the suggestion that her writing might become more confiding or confessional--more like Annie Dillard's, in short. Zwinger holds allegiance to a traditional practice of natural history, one in which personal testimony figures prominently but personal history very little; and we might ask, among other things, what sorts of proprieties she is insisting upon. Thus nature writing makes an issue of both disciplinary and discursive boundaries, both potentially assimilable to notions of genre.

In a related way, it makes an issue of writerly identity, especially as concerns the situatedness of the act of writing, the reasons for and repercussions of writing on site. What role is assumed by the person writing en plein air, out in the open? Does the writer function as a scientist, a reporter, an explorer, a rhapsode, a participant-observer? What ethos, what status attaches to these roles; how do they affect our estimation of the text we read and our expectations of ourselves as we write? What are the features of and what the relation between writing done on site--notes, observations, emissions--and the writing composed at home or in some other enclosed space? In the accounts of some practitioners, only the latter activity, the painstaking drafting of public pieces, gets called "writing" at all; the former, the inscribing on site, is assimilated to a qualitatively different and opposed condition called "living." There is writing and there is living: how might this tacit split operate among writers of many sorts? Is it possible to conceive of a "living" that involves inscription as a way of participating in place but does not eventuate in the vexations or dislocations of "writing"?⁷ Questions of this sort fit squarely within the investigations of writing process and sites that have long been a mainstay of composition studies. In some respects they represent an important countercurrent, one ecological in character, to the prevailing current of such inquiries. There are plenty of investigations afoot of composing within our proliferating electronic "environments": there is not much done with the person pushing a pencil under the sun, though the latter is demonstrably less energy-consuming.

Given the testament that pencil may issue in, the manuscript it produces may itself come to be taken as the emblem of one's inhabitation of a place, the way John Muir's blurred and rain-blotted field journals bespeak his absorption in the Sierras.⁸ This reinforces an observation I touched upon earlier: how nature writing functions as a narrative exemplar for its readers and practitioners in ways that few if any other "literary" genres do. That is, it may issue in what I call "participatory" readings, readings pursued in the expectation that the writer's testament may be emulated in a quite direct sense. You might read about a certain bird then look for that bird. Like Thoreau, you might traverse the Maine Woods someday--assuming the woods have not been logged over. The chance that they will be left intact, the belief that you should find them in essentially the state Thoreau reports or even recapitulate something of the story he constructs, and also the prospect that they will be plundered by the time you read about them: all this conduces to evoke permanence of an ecological order, the permanence and integrity of landscape, the permanence of loss--not the rationalized, Platonic permanence that our critical faculties can readily debunk, but permanence in Nelson Goodman's sense of simply a good long time (124). It evokes sustainability, a virtue proper to ecology, a way of disengaging the metaphors of progress (as opposed to improvement) that enthrall our students--our leaders, too--and impede real change. In stories of retreat in nature, scene has agency; sustainability is the cultivation of ethical relations with place. Wendell Berry says, "An adequate relationship between people and the land is not a monologue but a conversation. If the land has something to say back, the good farmer hears it" (Ehrenfeld 170). But our students and their teachers are mostly deaf to the land, and so there is no exchange. One useful endeavor for writing teachers might be to pursue through textwork a dialogics of place.

I have allowed that nature writing is not sufficient to such large purposes, but I have not yet suggested how it may in some versions be counterproductive--maladaptive, even. Yet this is among the most interesting and productive of my findings, how nature writing and commentary on nature writing may betray, may narrativize, values and attitudes at odds with some it might be presumed to enact. For while the narrative logic of retreat makes perfect sense on its own terms, those terms themselves, "nature" and its counterparts, are riven with tensions and discontinuities: ripe grounds for the exercise of our capacities for suspicion.⁹ How could it be otherwise, when the point of the story is to lose the human, yet the undertaking itself is a human one, reported to humans for human purposes? The logic of such a situation can be variously worked out. The subject in nature may cease, at least provisionally, to be human (or exclusively human). Other humans in the vicinity can be subordinated or effaced, placed beyond the frame of attention. More ominously, those humans who do inhabit the place marked as pure nature--native peoples--may be taken as features of that place or constructed as some liminal phenomenon that is less than purely natural and less than fully human--the natural history-museum treatment.¹⁰ Or place itself may be gendered as female and some trope of romance, enthrallment, or ravishment projected upon it. All these phenomena are grounds for attention in a Scholesian vein. Yet so are the prospects some of this writing holds for refiguring gender and ethnicity in more responsible, sustainable ways, by modeling quests without dominance, understandings without mastery.

What is most clearly at issue in this writing, it may be, is the constitution of the individual subject within or beyond the social milieu. In this respect, it relates to our discipline's cogitations over the social or solitary character of the composing subject. On the face of it, these dramas of solitude might be thought to enact the most blatant individualism, the most extreme expressivist tendencies, upon the terms James Berlin has popularized. But as the individual-social split is one of the "killer dichotomies" Ann Berthoff decries, so it is that the purified solitude of retreat, as represented in narrative, may betray a social dimension. Says the nature writer Edward Lueders, "In solitude I become social and candid. I converse quite successfully" (Clam Lake Papers, 22). There is more to be said about this ironic mode of sociability, surpassing the bounds of this overview. Suffice it to say that, in its attention to the solitary subject in the natural, i.e., noncultural sphere, nature writing is ascetic in Geoffrey Galt Harpham's expansive sense of the term: sited outside of culture, it "raises the issue of culture" and a culturally-constituted self in ways that are narratively propounded (xii, emphasis in original).

For that matter, it raises the issue of writing itself, and thus of cultural difference in one central respect. This is the reason for the slash mark I've imposed on my title. By a set of terministic equivalences commonplace to Western culture--equivalences that are "temporized" in stories of all sorts--"nature" is signed as the opposite of "culture," and "culture," in turn, takes writing as its quintessence. "Nature/writing": the writing of that which does not write, approximating (impossibly) the condition of its own absence. Except there exist nonwriting peoples, too, who occupy an indeterminate position with respect to these poles and the anxieties and desires attending them. And nature writing has long been interested in such peoples, has prized their stories and longed for their ways of knowing, has celebrated their distance from the technological dispensation that prevails among us. It has seldom entertained the notion that these peoples' privileged intimacies with place may be predicated on their freedom from literacy. Yet the tacit split I alluded to earlier--between "living" and "writing"--suggests that some such logic may be at work. So it is that nature writing may raise the issue of literacy within nature or against nature--of material subsistence derived through or despite economies underwritten by literate technologies--with the nonliterate indigene a mediating figure in these tensions. Not writing (though not "lacking" writing), the indigene is permitted (not restricted) to dwell exclusively in the countervailing realm of "living," which is to say, the place itself--or so the story goes.

But of course this is a speculative prospect, one horizon against which we who teach and reflect upon literacy might situate our efforts to reconfigure our behaviors. I will conclude with a note on subjects closer to home: our students. It's been my experience that my students will offer stories of their own that partake of or participate in the cultural logic I've been describing, in ways that ratify, complicate, or counter texts of the sort I've attended to. So their stories, I find, can constitute a powerful means of beginning where they are, en route to wherever it is, upon the understandings I've offered, they and I think they could afford to be. Such a passage is a narrative prospect in itself, irremediably didactic, if Hayden White is right in suggesting that all narrative necessarily enacts "the passage from one moral order to another" (22, emphasis in original). White is suspicious of this, understandably so; yet a transformation of some order seems more than warranted if we're to persist, let alone flourish, as a species. Whatever reconfigured desires we can envision, whatever revised notions of accomplishment, achievement, fulfillment, identity and the like, will certainly be configured in stories--not least the stories we tell of the successes of students. Nature, too, is the scene and agent of instruction: I would hope we can cultivate its representations in ways that conduce to its tutelage. That, at least, is the story I'd like to tell.