Oecologies

Mikhaila Redovian, University of California, Davis

Though Joshua Calhoun’s most recent book, The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England was published in December of 2019, the global pandemic delayed celebrating his innovative publication until this year. That additional time allowed Oecologies members to engage deeply with the text, thus the celebration included productive conversation about the generative character of The Nature of the Page and where it has taken scholars since the text’s publication.

The celebration, held virtually on June 3^rd, began with a panel discussion reflecting the text’s applicability across subfields of early modern literary study. Panelists included Miles Grier (Queens College), Peter C. Remien (Lewis-Clark State College), Breanne Weber (formally UC Davis; currently UVA), and Heidi Brayman (UC Riverside). Grier began by addressing the questionable ethics of environmental readings that center non-human agencies when not all humans have been afforded human agency. But, Grier argued, Calhoun’s text opens avenues for uniting both racial and environmental readings, for example, Calhoun’s reading of “blots” and “smudges” as more than just accidentals. In Grier’s reading, these marks present in manuscript and early print editions of Hamlet or the Henriad were either consciously overwritten, erased, or scraped away, which can be compared to how certain bodies and experiences are written out of our textual records. Additionally, Grier compared paper and Desdemona when discussing blots in Shakespeare’s Othello, insofar as both the character and the text are able to be “marked” by Othello’s racialization. In this case, focusing on the material agencies of the text allows for a deeper engagement with both environmental readings and readings about the construction of race.

Peter Remien followed, arguing that modern accounting and business practices were built on access to paper ledgers. Though organized accounting is taken for granted in the age of the digital spreadsheet, recording transactions on paper fundamentally changed how business operated; it required access to cheap paper. Estuarine environments were, and still are, necessary for the material production of many of the goods that enable our scholarship today, including paper. Though the internet has divorced much scholarly work from material bounds, Remien advocated for continued attention to these situated relationships. In particular, he noted how the site of Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, ID—a city with legacies of milling and paper industry—encourage his work to remain materially grounded. This is also true of his work on the language of metaphor. Remien asked us to keep the situatedness of terms such as “ecology” and “plant” in mind, noting the unique historical and political moments leading to their development. “Ecology,” Remien argued, has overgrown its bounds, and using the term to describe political, historical, or social actions obscures the original meaning of the term. However, attending to linguistic situatedness can help us recover the original humanistic and scientific events that led to a term’s creation—one of many ways to reunite scientific and humanistic inquiry. 

Breanne Weber then shifted our conversation by asking how Calhoun’s text allows us to attend to book history by moving beyond typesetting and circulation patterns. By focusing on the materiality of bookmaking, the role of artisanal knowledge production can be better recognized, and the artisans themselves come into better focus. As Weber turned our attention to the artisans and materials of early modern texts, she reminded us of our own estrangement from the materiality of current bookmaking processes: our texts are still mixed species assemblages. Like Remien, Weber reminded us that early modern textual practices remain an important foundation for contemporary practices. Finally, Weber underscored the importance of shared knowledge-making across the academic and the artisanal fields.

Heidi Brayman rounded out the panel discussion by assessing materiality beyond the text itself by drawing attention to the “polygraphical” nature of all written texts. Brayman contended that by attending to texts as objects as well as words on a page, we can understand what is typically left to metaphorical and physical margins, to things and people that are alluded to but not explicit in texts. By looking beyond the edges of the text, the beloveds for whom sonnets are composed come into clearer focus for example. Finally, these beyond-the-words analyses of texts can lead us to think about ephemerality and non-permanence. Though certain elements of the text are plainly visible and more obviously “readable” than others, the relational and sometimes practical knowledge behind such texts is only recorded outside of the book covers. Writers, bookbinders, and papermakers are all necessary to produce the artifacts we read, and looking beyond the language itself is one way to recover these people and their relationships.

Calhoun returned to these ideas of relationships and ephemerality as the panel discussion came to an end. Calhoun reminded us that by not taking questions of materiality seriously, we may lose sight of what we still don’t know. Calhoun also reaffirmed the necessity of leaning into subjectivity as a method for literary exploration. As each panelist emphasized the importance of recognizing extra-textual relationships, Calhoun agreed that assessing specific relationships with people and places can deepen and expand our scholarship. As part of recognizing the material and intellectual contributions that are easily written out of a text, Calhoun noted the importance of capacious and at times “excessive” citation practices. Making various knowledges inherent in textual production explicit and citing non-academic sources are possible methods to recreate the many relationships that surround a text. As Weber posited, creating a text is an inter-species practice, and maintaining citations that include non-academic forms of knowledge production brings these relationships to the fore.

The celebration concluded with a Q&A for audience members. One of the major themes that emerged was how to create an ethics for our own textual practices. Audience members noted the long history in both critical race and women and gender studies for citational ethics, as both a site of recognition and resistance. These ethical questions also extend to material questions about scholarly publication. With recent attention to supply chains and the environmental impact of physical printing, how do scholars balance the ecological effects of scholarly production, including travel, with accessibility goals? In the end, the assembled group agreed that there is not one prescriptive ethics that will work in every case; however, by putting more examples of thorough citation practices that deeply consider the sacrifices necessary to creating environments for books, it is possible to expand current publication models.