Prof. Barton St. Armand, who teaches at Brown, was also attending the conference. I asked him if environmental studies was the latest fad in academe. This is a new place in the curriculum. Students like it because it taps into some very basic concerns, and teachers of literature like it because they're bored with theory. Literary theory wasn't real.
Nature is tangible.
He paused to reflect. We're seeing a return to realism, to exact and esthetically pleasing descriptions of nature. The first morning of the conference, I met my colleague John Elder for breakfast at a pancake house in Fort Collins. Scott Russell Sanders, an essayist, sat across from us in the booth, beside Prof. Lawrence Buell, who teaches at Harvard. Since arriving in Fort Collins, I'd been hearing about ecocritics.