Eco-Criticism

11 Key excerpts on "Eco-Criticism"

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  Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory

  An Overview

  • Jeffrey R. Di Leo(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ecocriticism

  11.0  INTRODUCTION

  Ecocriticism is an abbreviation for ecological literary criticism. It can be traced back to the late 1970s, where it was coined by William Rueckert in “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978). However, it was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that it began to be used with some frequency to refer to an interdisciplinary field in literary and cultural studies. Cheryll Glotfelty is credited as reviving the term in 1989 as an alternative to a domain within literary and cultural studies that was formerly referred to as the study of nature writing.

  Ecocriticism, or, alternately, green theory, might be regarded as concerned with the following:

  (1) The Environmental Imagination—ecocriticism analyzes the role that the natural environment plays in the imagination of a cultural community at a specific historical moment;

  (2) The Concept of Nature—ecocriticism examines how the concept of “nature” is defined;

  (3) The Value of Nature—ecocriticism asks what are the values that are assigned to nature or denied it and why;

  (4) The Relationship between Humans and Nature—ecocriticism explores the way in which the relationship between humans and nature is envisioned;

  (5) Literary Genres—ecocriticism investigates how nature is used literally or metaphorically in certain literary or aesthetic genres and tropes. It also explores the assumptions about nature that underlie these genres and tropes; and,

  (6) Environmental Activism—ecocriticism intervenes in current social, political, and economic debates surrounding environmental pollution and preservation.1

  Moreover, though the terms ecocriticism and green theory are often used interchangeably, some use the former term in a more narrow sense to refer only to the study of literature and nature; and the latter term in a wider sense to refer not only to the study of literature, but also art, film, music, politics, and philosophy in relation to nature. In addition, it might be noted that ecocriticism is the preferred term in the US, whereas green theory

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  Framing the World

  Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film

  • Paula Willoquet-Maricondi(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • University of Virginia Press

    (Publisher)

  The Environmental Imagination: (1) works in which the nonhuman world is not mere backdrop for human action but helps us situate human history within natural history; (2) works that do not single out human interest as the only significant interest; (3) and works whose ethical orientation includes human responsibility and accountability toward the environment and the nonhuman sphere (7–8). At the same time, and as some of the essays in this collection will make clear, ecocriticism enables us to identify other types of texts that are not “self-evidently about nature” (Barry 259) but that nonetheless offer us needed perspectives on the relations between the human and the nonhuman.

  Ecological literary studies became a recognizable and consolidated critical school in the early 1990s, although its origins date back to the 1960s and ‘70s. The term “ecocriticism” has a history of its own, having first been used in 1978 by William Rueckert to refer in a more restrictive way to the application of ecological concepts to literature (Glotfelty xx). Literary ecocriticism today includes the study of nature writing as a genre; it examines the role of the physical setting in literary productions, the values expressed in relation to the environment, and the correlation between what a culture says about the environment and how it treats it; it conceives of place as a critical category; it looks for correspondences among gender, class, ethnicity, and nature; it asks how culturally produced texts affect our relationship with the natural world; it traces changes through time in a culture's concept of environment; and it examines representations of the environmental crisis in literature. In short, ecocriticism acknowledges that the world is composed of the social sphere and the ecosphere, that the two are interrelated, and that the former cannot be considered outside the context of the latter.

  The practice of something analogous to literary ecocriticism has even older roots. Before the term was ever used, the study of textual engagement with the nonhuman world from an ecological standpoint had already commanded the attention of students of philosophy, ethics, and critical theory. One of the first efforts to address the ecological crisis from within critical theory, and at a time when ecological consciousness was only beginning to surface in popular discourse, is Joel Whitebook's 1979 essay “The Problem of Nature in Habermas.” In this essay White-book argues that the domination of nature is a constitutive feature of what we call the modern era, roughly spanning from the seventeenth century to now, notwithstanding our current claims as postmoderns. Whitebook begins his investigation by asking whether a strictly anthropocentric perspective could meet the challenges of an ecological crisis of such unprecedented dimension. He writes, “Even if it could be shown theoretically

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  The Greening Of Literary Scholarship

  Literature, Theory, and he Environment

  • Steven Rosendale(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • University Of Iowa Press

    (Publisher)

  Introduction Extending Ecocriticism steven rosendale Environmental literary criticism is at something of a crossroads: once the province of a tiny coterie of literary professionals, it is on the verge of becoming an important subfield of literary scholarship at American universities. Supported by a large national organization (As-sociation for the Study of Literature and Environment [ASLE]) and a number of publishing outlets, ecocriticism may not yet be in the main-stream, but it has become one of the more publicly visible currents in lit-erary study today. 1 The demand for classes in literature and the environ-ment is growing (the ASLE Web site, for example, provides links to over 150 university classes), and the number of university composition courses and programs built around environmental themes increases annually. Several universities now offer graduate training in literature and the en-vironment, and a growing number of scholars are emerging from Ph.D. work with dissertations on literature and the environment in hand. Envi-ronmental literary criticism, it appears, has a chance of establishing a last-ing presence in American universities. How ecocriticism arrived at its present institutional condition is a story that has been summarized elsewhere (for example, Glotfelty, “Introduc-tion,” xv–xxiv), but several elements of that story deserve additional em-phasis here. From its origins, ecocriticism was methodologically and the-oretically eclectic, encompassing a wide variety of literatures and critical practices, some of them already well established in literary studies. But the movement’s identity today — its status as a distinctive, recognizable critical enterprise — derives less from the ecumenical reality of the entire field than from the more oppositional and even revolutionary emphasis of early endeavors to establish environmental criticism in the academy.

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  Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory

  • Gabriel Egan(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • The Arden Shakespeare

    (Publisher)

  First, some prehistory. The landmark event that recorded the full emergence of a discipline of literary ecocriticism was the appearance in 1996 of a collection of twenty-seven essays comprising a ‘reader’ on the subject, although (as often happens with such books) many of its contributors traced 22 SHAKESPEARE AND ECOCRITICAL THEORY the origins of the school to earlier and more obscure work. Answering the question ‘what is ecocriticism?’, the collec-tion’s co-editor Cheryll Glotfelty offers a series of definitions, including ‘the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment’ based on ‘the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it’, and hence having ‘one foot in literature and the other on land’. 7 The examples of inter-rogations that ecocritics might explore include the alarmingly vague and question-begging ‘Are the values expressed in this play consistent with ecological wisdom?’; and the impossibly vast ‘How has the concept of wilderness changed over time?’ Across disciplines related to literary studies, ecological awareness began to shape new areas of thought, most recog-nizably in the 1990s, with specialists identifying earlier ideas relating to current environmental events that were being moulded into a new intellectual lens. In the field of ecolinguistics, for example, the first ‘reader’ appeared in 2001, and one of its editors, Alwin Fill, provided a useful account of the state of the art that traced how linguists had changed their ideas about the relationship between a language and its environment, with ‘environment’ understood in a variety of ecological as well as non-ecological senses. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, a number of linguists have traced how writers foreground or efface human agency when writing about various ecological concerns.

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  Ecological Literary Criticism

  Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind

  • Karl Kroeber(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  ¿ φ φ one Introducing Ecological Criticism My purpose in this book is to encourage the development of an ecolog-ically oriented literary criticism. This criticism, escaping from the esoteric abstractness that afflicts current theorizing about literature, seizes oppor-tunities offered by recent biological research to make humanistic studies more socially responsible. Biologists have arrived at the frontier of revo-lutionary new conceptions of humanity's place within the natural world. Humanists willing to think beyond self-imposed political and metaphys-ical limits of contemporary critical discourse can use these scientific advances to make literary studies contribute to the practical resolution of social and political conflicts that rend our society. Humanists could help to ensure, for example, that the effects on our world of new biological research are beneficent rather than malign. Ecological literary criticism concentrates on linkages between natural and cultural processes. It thus functions transmissively. Instead of with-drawing the objects of its study into a hermetic discourse, it seeks to enhance widespread appreciation of how literary art may connect cultur-al experiences to natural facts. Ecological criticism is holistic, which requires that its primary focus be directed to the individuality of works of art—and of the audiences responding to them. Ecological criticism can therefore foster a cosmopolitan appreciation of differences and unique-1 i n t r o d u c i n g e c o l o g i c a l c r i t i c i s m nesses, especially in the processes of cultural transformation. It takes a form distinct from the philosophic essay currently popular with critics, tending toward narrative structures more responsive to the singularity of historical phenomena.

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  Extending ecocriticism

  Crisis, collaboration and challenges in the environmental humanities

  • Peter Barry, William Welstead, Peter Barry, William Welstead(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  1Ecocriticism extends its boundaries Peter Barry and William Welstead

  Environmental literary criticism, usually contracted to ecocriticism, has advanced considerably since the term was widely adopted in the 1980s and 1990s. The aim of this book is threefold: firstly to consider examples of this advance across genres within literary studies and beyond into other creative forms; secondly to explore the ecocritical implications of collaboration across genres in the humanities; and thirdly to explore literary, artistic and performance production through direct collaboration between the creative disciplines and the sciences.

  Although she was not the first to use the term ‘ecocriticism’ as a contraction of ‘ecological literary criticism’, its popularisation is attributed to Cheryll Glotfelty, who at a meeting of the Western Literary Association in 1989, proposed that the term ‘ecocriticism’ be used for what had previously been known as ‘the study of nature writing’. Her proposal was seconded by Glen Love, who had been thinking along the same lines. In a 2003 essay on Willa Cather she suggested that ‘the term ecocriticism for a critical practice that would take as its subject “the interconnections between human culture and the material world, between human and nonhuman”’ (see Glotfelty 2003 ). It is perhaps significant that ‘biodiversity’ as a contraction of biological diversity was also adopted in the same decade, when W.G. Rosen suggested its use at the 1985 National Forum on Biological Diversity.1

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  Introducing Criticism in the 21st Century

  • Julian Wolfreys(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • EUP

    (Publisher)

  Within the academic institutions of the global North, the recollection of human dependence upon an increasingly endangered more-than-human ‘mesh’ (Morton 2010) has not come easily to those disciplines devoted to the study of cultural artifacts. Literary critics and cultural theorists in particular were notoriously slow to register those changes in thinking about the relationship of culture and society to non-human others and the environment which began to be articulated in neighbouring disciplines, above all philosophy, but also theology, politics and history, from the early 1970s. ‘If your knowledge of the outside world were limited to what you could infer from the major pub-lications of the literary profession,’ observed Cheryll Glotfelty in 1996 in her introduction to the first ecocriticism reader, you would quickly discern that race, class and gender were the hot topics of the late twentieth century, but you would never know that the earth’s life support systems were under stress. Indeed, you might never know that there was an earth at all. (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996: xvi) There were in fact some isolated calls for an ecologically oriented criticism from the early 1970s. 2 However, it was not until the end of the twentieth century that the study of literature and the environment was finally recog-nized as ‘a subject on the rise’. 3 By the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, ecocriticism was acquiring considerable historical depth, international reach, and theoretical sophistication. Having begun to find a firm foothold in many universities throughout the world, environmental literary KATE RIGBY 124 criticism now joins other ecologically oriented areas of study in what has become known globally as the transdisciplinary field of the Environmental Humanities. In some respects it is perhaps not surprising that the study of literary texts should be coupled with such forgetfulness of other-than-human entities and processes.

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  Ecology without Nature

  Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics

  • Timothy Morton(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  On the other hand, the study accounts for the qualities of existing ecocriti-cism, placing them in context and taking account of their paradoxes, Introduction • 9 dilemmas, and shortcomings. “A theory of ecological criticism” is a theoretical reflection upon ecocriticism: to criticize the ecocritic. Ecology without Nature thus hesitates between two places. It wavers both inside and outside ecocriticism. (For reasons given later, I am at pains not to say that the book is in two places at once.) It supports the study of literature and the environment. It is wholeheartedly ecological in its political and philosophical orientation. And yet it does not thump an existing ecocritical tub. It does not mean to undermine ecocriticism entirely. It does not mean to suggest that there is nothing “out there.” But Ecology without Nature does challenge the assumptions that ground ecocriticism. It does so with the aim not of shutting down Eco-Criticism, but of opening it up. Environmentalism is a set of cultural and political responses to a crisis in humans’ relationships with their surroundings. Those re-sponses could be scientific, activist, or artistic, or a mixture of all three. Environmentalists try to preserve areas of wilderness or “outstanding natural beauty.” They struggle against pollution, including the risks of nuclear technologies and weaponry. They fight for animal rights and vegetarianism in campaigns against hunting and scientific or commer-cial experimentation on animals. They oppose globalization and the patenting of life-forms. Environmentalism is broad and inconsistent. You can be a commu-nist environmentalist, or a capitalist one, like the American “wise use” Republicans. You can be a “soft” conservationist, sending money to charities such as Britain’s Woodland Trust, or a “hard” one who lives in trees to stop logging and road building.

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  Ecology and Life Writing

  • Alfred Hornung, Zhao Baisheng(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Universitätsverlag Winter

    (Publisher)

  Without knowing what is going on in terms of ecocritical theory, we are simply kept in the dark and confine our knowledge to a narrow scope. Second, not all Chinese critics are fully aware of the dis-tinct branches within the field of ecocriticism, thus blurring literary ecocriticism and cultural ecocriticism. They do not seem to know the aim of literary ecocriticism. If ecocriticism studies the relationship be-tween man and nature, aiming at ecological protection, it can be defined as a type of “cultural criticism” in a very broad sense, including various 82 Yang Jincai perspectives such as the philosophical, the ethical and the sociological. A literary ecological perspective, in contrast, is supposed to explore how literature integrates an ecological concern as a discourse. Third, the ecological consciousness in contemporary Chinese literature is too lim-ited and critical practices are therefore a bit narrow-minded. The number of works that can really both approach contemporary Chinese society from an ecological stance and stand out artistically is rather small. As some translations are of poor quality, misreading and sometimes farfetched interpretations of a text are common practice in contemporary Chinese literary studies. This is especially the case with those who rely heavily on translations. Therefore an urge remains to encourage well-qualified translations of ecocritical theories to keep pace with academia outside China. Accordingly, we should find a voice for literary discus-sion and ecocriticism that does the highest kind of justice to the literary text, and at the same time reaches outside the academy to include the world of writers, readers and reviewers. Works Cited Chen, Maolin. “Prospects for Western Literary Theory in the New Century: Cultural Studies and Eco-Criticism.” Xueshu Jiaoliu [Academic Exchange] 4 (2003): 114-19. Chen, Yingsong. “Baozi Zuihoude Wudao” [“The Last Dancing of the Leop-ard”].

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  "Am not I / A fly like thee?"

  Human-Animal Relations in William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience"

  • Liza Bauer(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Büchner-Verlag

    (Publisher)

  Exploring how this relationship is being staged in literary works and attempting to find innovative ways of doing so constitutes the main tasks for the ecocritical scholar. 2 Positioning Blake Within Ecocritical Discourse 23 After William Rueckert first coined the movement’s name in his 1978 essay »Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism,« the rapidly-expanding field has now already become more of an um-brella term which refers to a variety of critical approaches (cf. McKu-sick 2000: 12). Marland points out that: from its early incarnation as the relatively under-theorised preserve of nature writing enthusiasts to its current vibrant state as a sophis-ticated array of ›earth-centred‹ approaches to cultural criticism that mobilise and reframe theories drawn from a range of disciplines in-cluding ecology, philosophy, sociology and biology. (2013: 846) This current vibrant state manifests itself in numerous recently-de-veloped ideas and in the field’s inter-disciplinary tendency to engage with diverse literary forms and media on the basis of frameworks from both the humanities and the natural sciences. However, before these new horizons can be portrayed, it is of course especially impor-tant for this study to look at the discipline’s beginnings: the ecocritical reading of Romantic texts. For even if the discipline arose already in the 60s and 70s, con-comitantly to modern environmentalism as a reaction to the in-creased exploitation of nature in an age of capitalist-consumerism, some argue it only established itself firmly in the early 1990s as a counter-movement to New Historicism. Peter Heymans interprets this counter-movement as a protest against »the New Historicists’ persistent politicisation of nature and nature writing« (Heymans 2012: 12).

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  Ecolinguistics Reader

  Language, Ecology and Environment

  • Alwin Fill, Peter Mühlhäusler(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  All this does not touch the fact that the ideology contained in the original meaning of these words can be and should be rejected. My argument is simply that this rejection cannot be justified on the basis of general ecological principles, but belongs in the sphere of ideological criticism (see also Alexander 1996). 4. Ecolinguistic Criticism of Ideologies What seems important regarding the different forms of ecolinguistic criticism of ideologies is the formal criterion of unit of reference. On the one hand, there is criticism of entire systems of categorization, for instance of the lexical differentiation between comparable human and animal activities (essen vs.fressen, cf. Fill 1993:107 f.) or of the consistent objectivization of organisms, as in the language of industrial agriculture (cf. Trampe 1991). At the other end of the spectrum, there is the critique of individual words, because of their 'literal meaning' (e.g. Um-welt -en-vironment) or because of their negative or positive 'deontics' 2 (e.g. Wtiste -desert) or for both reasons (e.g. Unkraut -weeds). The critique of individual words - at least in German -is typically a critique of complex words and their secondary naming motivation, whether they are derivatives (Unkraut) or compounds (Odland). The investigation of language (langue), particularly of vocabulary, as expression of the world view of a language community, has a long tradition. From the ecolinguistic point of view, it is particularly the aspect of the anthropocentrism of the vocabulary which is emphasized. Fill (1993:105) distinguishes three variants: 274 ECOLOGICAL CRITICISM OF LANGUAGE (1) utility naming, (2) emotional distancing, and (3) euphemizing. My own differentiation will deviate from this in some points. 4.1. Anthropocentrism If anthropocentrism is understood as naming from the human point of view, it has to be kept in mind that in an absolute sense language is always anthropocentric.

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