The Personal and the Planetal: Essaying the Ecological
type: CreativeWork
description: “The Personal and the Planetal: Essaying the Ecological” investigates contemporary American personal essays in an environmental mode in order to illuminate the boundaries between “self” and “planet.” It does so with an eye toward ecological devastation—namely, the violent effects of global warming—because I sense that thinking about the essay can help us better understand the ethical problems of climate change. Part of our climate crisis is a failure to recognize the boundaries of the personal and what I call the “planetal” (in an attempt to defamiliarize it from the more common “planetary”). Using a method that I call “the ecological essay,” I read for the forces that structure those boundaries in how Americans narrate their personal experiences. How we define a sense of self—how we define “us” (human self) and “them” (other selves, both human and not)—is a crucial question for reading in the time of climate change. An assumed rigidity in those categories has confused liberal humanism with the human, a collapse that threatens to unravel the planetary systems that give us life because it diminishes our capacity to imagine ourselves in ways that are not short-sightedly masterful, voraciously extractive, and proudly oblivious to the interdependent webs of life on which our lives depend. Using critical concepts from the environmental humanities, I define how a personal essay works to narrate a sense of a conscious self in literature. Critical discourses in humanism, queer theory, and the environmental humanities—specifically, environmental literary nonfiction—also provide key insights. With a heightened awareness of genre, the study asks whether an essay’s anthropocentrism might position it strategically in order to shift the bounds of the personal beyond the hyper-individual. Literary analysis that challenges our definition of “human” is vital to the humanities—as to our understanding of global warming—because it clarifies how we narrate ourselves living on the planet…
abstract: “The Personal and the Planetal: Essaying the Ecological” investigates contemporary American personal essays in an environmental mode in order to illuminate the boundaries between “self” and “planet.” It does so with an eye toward ecological devastation—namely, the violent effects of global warming—because I sense that thinking about the essay can help us better understand the ethical problems of climate change. Part of our climate crisis is a failure to recognize the boundaries of the personal and what I call the “planetal” (in an attempt to defamiliarize it from the more common “planetary”). Using a method that I call “the ecological essay,” I read for the forces that structure those boundaries in how Americans narrate their personal experiences. How we define a sense of self—how we define “us” (human self) and “them” (other selves, both human and not)—is a crucial question for reading in the time of climate change. An assumed rigidity in those categories has confused liberal humanism with the human, a collapse that threatens to unravel the planetary systems that give us life because it diminishes our capacity to imagine ourselves in ways that are not short-sightedly masterful, voraciously extractive, and proudly oblivious to the interdependent webs of life on which our lives depend. Using critical concepts from the environmental humanities, I define how a personal essay works to narrate a sense of a conscious self in literature. Critical discourses in humanism, queer theory, and the environmental humanities—specifically, environmental literary nonfiction—also provide key insights. With a heightened awareness of genre, the study asks whether an essay’s anthropocentrism might position it strategically in order to shift the bounds of the personal beyond the hyper-individual. Literary analysis that challenges our definition of “human” is vital to the humanities—as to our understanding of global warming—because it clarifies how we narrate ourselves living on the planet…
author: Wilson, Eric Dean
keywords: American Literature, American Studies, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies, Literature in English, North America, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority, Nonfiction, personal essay, environmental humanities, climate change, ecocriticism, queer theory, creative nonfiction
date published: 2023-06-01T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T02:00:04Z
provider: City University of New York - Graduate Center
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York