“It does make a difference whether you see literature as a predominantly intertextual undertaking or as a living, breathing act of responding to a world of human and nonhuman others.”

A discussion with Christopher Schliephake on his journey with ecocriticism and late antiquity.

Dr. phil. habil. Christopher Schliephake is an ancient historian, with an Americanist background and a keen interest in environmental history, sustainability and resilience studies, and literary ecology. He has (co)authored several books including The Environmental Humanities and the Ancient World: Questions and Perspectives (Cambridge UP), Conversing with Chaos: Writing and Reading Environmental Disorder in Ancient Texts (Bloomsbury, with Esther Eidinow), and Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene (Lexington, with Evi Zemanek). He is currently working on a new environmental history of the ancient world.

Can you tell us about how and why you became interested in ecocritical thinking?
I first came into touch with ecocriticism during my time as a graduate student. I had been invited to join the “Oberseminar” in Amerikanistik by Hubert Zapf in the late 2000s. Each term, we would read and discuss numerous texts on recent ecocritical approaches – a lot of theory, but also classics of the canon like Thoreau and Emerson and newer books by Richard Powers and others.

This was the perfect time to study ecocriticism and I think it was the best place to do it at that time in Germany. The way they approached literary texts by thinking about what kind of function the literary imagination played in culture and how it drew from the nonhuman world as a source of inspiration resonated with me.

I had studied a lot of cultural theory on memory studies and I thought that there were some parallels to what Hubert was doing. I would study the intersections between space, place, memory and (the mythical) imagination in my own research – this interest was further fuelled by fascinating guest professors like Serenella Iovino who joined us around 2009/10 and who inspired me, bringing a stronger materialist and also philosophical approach to the table. I benefited enormously from that and my dissertation in Americanist studies was situated at the intersection between cultural ecology and material ecocriticism.

Can you share with us a particular text that has inspired you to think in new ways about ecocriticism and late antiquity?
After my PhD in Americanist studies, I also did a PhD in ancient history. And during my transition from one field to the other, I was thinking about doing a project that would somehow bring together my Americanist background (and particularly the ecocritical one) with what I would be doing in ancient history.

I noticed that around 2013/14 there were not really any ecocritical explorations of ancient culture to speak of (although there were books that addressed different aspects of human-“nature” interactions and environmental history). When doing my research I read William Harris’ edited book (with E.R. Cook) on The Ancient Mediterranean Environment between Science and History. There is an essay in there by Michael McCormick that starts off with an environmental reading of Ausonius’ Mosella. Although the essay then trails off in another direction and makes some points about “consilience” that I find highly problematic, this was a reading of a late antique source where I had the feeling that it could pave the way for an ecocritical take on Ausonius (and other authors of that period). The term “Ecocriticism” doesn’t pop up there, mind you, and it still rarely does in classics (although that tide has finally turned) – but there were some intersections.

A very good text that somehow builds on McCormick, but also criticizes him in very instructive ways, is Kristina Sessa’s “The New Environmental Fall of Rome” – again, she doesn’t use the term “Ecocriticism” (as is the case with McCormick, her focus is on bringing climate science into dialogue with ancient source material), but from her exemplary reading of Eugippius some connections to ecocritical analyses could be drawn whose full potential have yet to be fully explored.

How do you think (late) antique texts might contribute to contemporary ecocritical thought?
There is still a lot of unexplored potential here. On both sides: there is a pervasive sense that classicists and ancient historians are finally waking up when it comes to the environmental dimension of ancient literature in general. The environment or the landscapes described in ancient texts can no longer be regarded as the mere stage of human history, as the scenery of a bigger, human drama – there is now a greater sensitivity to how the ancients framed their interactions with nonhuman life forms, and to how they perceived the threats and risks of their lifeworld – also those that were of anthropogenic making, for instance by the extraction of resources etc.

From an ecocritical viewpoint, there is also some catching up to do – although attempts at proto-“ecocritical” readings of the ancient tradition have been around since at least the nineteenth century (one may think of Alexander von Humboldt here), the place of the ancients has somewhat been relegated to the side-lines of a debate strongly focused on modernity. But we should not forget that two of the literary tropes associated with the environmental imagination, namely the pastoral and the apocalypse, are ancient in origin. And modern ecology had powerful forerunners in some pre-Socratics, Theophrastus, Pliny and others.

There is so much still to discover here.

One contribution will lie in tracing the roots and trajectories of environmental thinking across cultures and over the ages. Another one will lie in discovering wholly different worldviews and epistemologies that will help in decentering the human subject.

What new directions would you like to see in the field of ecocriticism, and in the study of late antique and other premodern literature?
Ecocriticism has branched out into so many different directions since its institutionalization that it is hard to think of new directions. But there are still roads that have yet to be taken – an ecocritical exploration of ancient literature, of Byzantine literature, of the literature of the Middle Ages, is still a promising field of research (it is only now, in 2024, that the first full-fledged ecocritical explorations of the Homeric epics are underway! – despite their status as foundational texts of world literature). So, in a way, there is catching-up to do when it comes to the ecocritical “canon” (there have been great attempts at that since the 2010s).

In terms of late antique and other premodern literature I hope that critics will start looking into ecocritical theory more closely, because there is a lot that could be adapted to the study of ancient texts – especially in order to move beyond semantic barriers and text-centered approaches that look at an author and its “Quellen”. Let us try to think of any premodern author as someone who was an attentive observer of the world around him (or her), who reflected on the different elements (human and nonhuman, cultural and natural) of his lifeworld and who had an embodied (not just intellectual) response to this world. To many, this may seem self-evident, maybe banal. But in practice, it does make a difference whether you see literature as a predominantly intertextual undertaking or as a living, breathing act of responding to a world of human and nonhuman others.