Eco-criticism
“Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions…”
—“This Compost” (42-3)
How texts use nature
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Commodification
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Symbolic/narrative treatments
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Use of nature (picaresque landscape) for
commercials- tea and travel
Romantic poems that focus on transcience
19th C landscape paintings
Direct symbolic transference (birds=freedom)
Background images with symbolic meaning
•
“The Lady of Shalott”, “La Belle Dame Sans
Merci”
How texts use nature (2)
• Realistic description
• “Natural” existence
• From a literal journey to a symbolic
quest
Ecocriticism
What is Ecocriticism?
– Also known as Environmental Criticism or Green
Studies
– Termed in the late 1970s, popularized in the
1990s
– Ecocriticism “explores the relations between
literature and the biological and physical
environment, conducted with an acute
awareness of the devastation that has been
wrought on that environment by human
activities.” (Abrams and Harpham 87)
Methodology/Critical Approach
What is Ecocriticism?
– No single theoretical perspective
(approaches include traditional,
poststructural, and postcolonial)
– Breaking down a binary:
Anthropocentrism vs. Ecocentrism
– Eco-whatever!
New deviations of ecocriticism include
focuses on race, ethnicity, social class, and
gender (Ecofeminism)
Keywords
• Ecology: the relationships between the air,
land, water, animals, plants, etc., usually of a
particular area, or the scientific study of this.
• Environmentalism: protecting the earth from
human pollution and destruction.
• Ecocriticism: Not just the studies of nature in
literature; “ecocriticism has distinguished
itself, debates notwithstanding, first by the
ethical stand it takes, its commitment to the
natural world as an important thing rather than
simply as an object of thematic study, and,
secondly, by its commitment to making
connections ”
Starting questions of a text
• What does the text define as “nature”?
• Does the text recognize the potentially
destructive consequences of the
developing nation?
• Does the text incorporate more of the
negative environmental effects of
Camden life in his later poetry?
• How do we resolve Whitman’s spectrum
of commentary (from a lack of concern to
an emphasis on it)?
Paradox
• Derrida argues that there is nothing outside of
text; but philosopher Kate Soper warns, “it is not
language which has a hole in the ozone layer.”
• To give language and the text a social conscience
and an intention seems to contradict Derrida.
Eco-critics reject the belief that everything is
socially or linguistically constructed. They reject
the entire belief of “constructedness”.
General introduction
“Major” claims:
•To regain a sense of the inextricability of nature
and culture, physis and techne, earth and artifactconsumption and destruction
• Critique of Current Critical Schools as 'Cold War
criticism'  'Global Warming criticism'
with their focus on human creativity, human agency
and human social relations,
– perpetuate that binary opposition of the human to
the non-human, culture to nature.
–
Methodology
• Premise:
Our position within an increasingly endangered
earth.
• Major claims:
Affirms nature writings: the eco-critics rigorously
defend literature's capacity
– to refer to a natural reality,
– to realize the relations between landscape and
lifestyle, and
– to remind us of non-human perspectives (of animals,
trees, rivers, mountains) towards an "environmental
literacy".
Methodology (2)
1. Critiquing the Canon
i.
the Hebrew creation in Genesis I - "not only
established a dualism of man and nature but also
insisted that it is God's will that humans exploit
nature for their proper ends' (Lyn White Jr. 'The Historical
Roots of Our Ecological Crisis': 10).
ii. classical tragedy -- reinforces the anthropocentric
'assumption that nature exist for the benefit of
humankind,”
iii. the pastoral tradition - a form of escapist fantasy,
valorizing a tamed and idealized nature over wild
no less than urban environments.
Methodology (3)
2. Reframing the text – e.g. “The Blind Man” in
the context of the natural world;
3. Revaluing Nature Writing –e.g. Alfred
Leopold’s Sand Country Almanac;
4. Return to Romanticism’s “neopastoral”;
5. Reconnecting the social and the ecological
e.g. Feminization of Nature; exploitation of
the aborigines and their lands;
6. Regrounding (and reshaping) language.
Shades of nature
• Area one: the wilderness (deserts, oceans,
uninhabited continents)
• Area two: the scenic sublime (forests,
lakes, mountains, cliffs, waterfalls)
• Area three: the countryside (hills, fields,
woods)
• Area four: the domestic picturesque
(parks, gardens, lanes)
Shades of nature (2)
• The different areas are basically a continuum
from “pure” nature to nature that has become
part of culture (is affected by culture) to
predominantly culture.
Critical centre
• We switch our critical attention from inner to
outer
• What had seemed as mere “setting” is taken
from a minor point in discussing literature to
the center of the discussion.
Pathetic fallacy
• Our instinctive tendency to see our
emotions reflected in our environment
• Example: “cruel sea” projects the human
attribute of cruelty onto a natural
element