ECOCRITICISM
• Ecocriticism is a name that implies ecological literacy. Eco and critic both derive from Greek, oikos and kritis' and in tandem they mean
"house judge," (…)
• Ecocritic is "a person who judges the merits
and faults of writings that depict the effects of culture upon nature, with a view toward
celebrating nature' berating its despoilers, and reversing their harm through political action.”
(Howart 69)
There isn’t any correct and clear-cut answer to the following questions:
• What is nature?
• Where is man’s place in nature?
• Does nature only exist for man’s needs?
• How can we define nature today considering ecological disasters?
• What is the contribution of literature/literary studies to ecology?
The Idea of ecocriticism appeared owing to natural crises such as
• Pollution
• Global Warming
• Overpopulation
• Waste Disposal (+Nuclear)
• Climate Change
• Deforestation
• Ozone Layer Depletion
• Ecocriticism is the study of literature and
environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where literature scholars analyze the
environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the
contemporary environmental situation and
examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature.
• Ecocriticism is the youngest of the revisionist movements that have influenced the
humanities over the past few decades. It was only in the 1990s that it began to gain
momentum, first in the US and in the UK, as more and more literary scholars began to ask what their field has to contribute to our
understanding of the unfolding environmental crisis.
• What is this new theory about? Ecocriticism makes us re-evaluate every other kind of
criticism. Primarily, it contests theories of
language (more on that later) and puts a whole new perspective on how to approach literary works.
• One of the recognised pioneers of ecocriticism, Cheryll Glotfelty, states that “Simply defined, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical
environment”.
• Ecocriticism, as it now exists in the USA, takes its literary bearings from the trancendentalist 19th century writers whose works celebrate nature, the life force, and the wilderness such as Ralph Waldo EMERSON, Margaret FULLER, and Henry David THOREAU.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)
• Emerson's first short book Nature ,published in 1836 is reflective essay on the impact upon him of the natural world, often voiced in
words of dramatic directness:
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.
I am glad to the brink of fear. (Emerson 38)
MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850)
• Margaret Fuller's first book was Summer on the Lakes, During 1843 which is a powerfully written journal of her encounter with the
American landscape at large, after a period as the first woman student at Harvard. At
Niagara, for instance, she writes:
• For here there is no escape from the weight of perpetual creation; all other forms and
motions come and go, the tide rises and
recedes, the wind, at its mightiest, moves in
gales and gusts, but here is really an incessant, an indefatigable motion. Awake or asleep,
there is no escape, still this rushing round you and through you. It is in this way I have most felt grandeur -somewhat eternal, if not
infinite. (Fuller,71)
HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862)
• Thoreau's Walden is an account of his two- year stay, from 1845, in a hut he had built on the shore of Walden Pond , Massachusetts. It is the classic of account of dropping out of
modern life and seeking to renew the self by a 'return to nature'.
• Therefore, these three books of the trancendentalists can be seen the
foundational works of American Ecocriticism.
• By contrast, the UK version of ecocriticism, or green studies takes its origin from the British Romanticism of the 1790s rather than the American transcendentalism of the 1840s.
• Generally, the preferred American term is Ecocriticism, whereas 'green studies' is frequently used in UK, and there is a tendency for the American writing to be
'celebratory' in tone, whereas the British variant tends to be more minatory, that is, it seeks to warn us of
environmental threats emanating from governmental, industrial and commercial forces
Major Figures in Ecocriticism
Cheryll Glotfelty
C. Glotfelty is the first professor of Literature and Environment in the USA. In 1996 she and Harold Fromm co-edited The Ecocriticism
Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, a
critical anthology that helped green the field of literary studies. She is co-founder and past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).
Lawrence Buell
As one of the founders of ecocriticism Lawrence Buell has a lot of publications about nature and literature. In his latest study, The Environmental Imagination, Buell analyses the perception of nature from Henry David Thoreau to
contemporary writers.
According to Lawrence Buell (1995, 7-8), an
environmentally oriented work should display the following characteristics:
•The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history. [...]
•The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest. [...]
•Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical framework. [...]
•Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text. [...]
Greg Garrard
• Greg Garrard is the FCCS Sustainability Professor at the
University of British Columbia, a National Teaching Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy, and a founding
member and former Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (UK & Ireland).
He is the author of Ecocriticism (Routledge 2004, 2011 2nd ed) as well as numerous essays on eco-pedagogy, animal studies and environmental criticism. He has recently edited Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies (Palgrave 2011) and The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (OUP 2014) and become co-editor of Green Letters: Studies in
Ecocriticism.
Scott Slovic
• Scott Slovic served as founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) from 1992 to 1995 and has edited the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment since 1995. The author of many books and articles in the field, he is currently writing Fundamentals of Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature and editing The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Environment, among other projects. He is professor of
literature and environment at the University of Idaho, USA.
• Scot Slovic prefers to offer a broad description of the field:
“Ecocriticism is the study of explicitly environmental texts from any scholarly approach or, conversely, the scrutiny of
ecological implications and human-nature relationships in any text, even texts that seem, at first glance, oblivious of the
nonhuman world.”
Serpil Oppermann
• She is one of the Turkish contributors to the development of ecocriticism. Oppermann published many research articles about ecocriticism and postmodernist English
literature. She is also the editor of the recently published book, Material Ecocriticism.
• What are the characteristics of Ecocriticism?
• Ecocriticism deals with the relationship between culture and nature.
• Ecocritics reject the notion that everything is socially or liguistically constructed.
• Let us look, then, at some provisional definitions of the
subject. It is from the ‘Introduction’ to The Ecocriticism Reader (1996), an important anthology of American ecocriticism:
What then is ecocriticism? Simply put, ecocriticism is the
study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of
production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies. (Glotfelty 1996: xix)
• Glotfelty goes on to specify some of the questions ecocritics ask, ranging from ‘How is nature represented in this sonne t?’ through ‘How has
the concept of wilderness changed over time?’ to ‘How is science itself open to literary analysis?’ and finally ‘What cross-fertilization is possible
between literary studies and environmental discourse in related disciplines such as history, philosophy, psychology, art history, and ethics?’
• Ecocriticism is, then, an avowedly political mode of analysis, as the comparison with feminism and Marxism suggests.
• Richard Kerridge’s definition in the mainly British Writing the Environment (1998) suggests, like Glotfelty’s, a broad cultural ecocriticism:
The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and
representations wherever they appear, to see more clearly a
debate which seems to be taking place, often part-concealed, in a great many cultural spaces. Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to
evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis.
(1998: 5)
• Ecocriticism is against the old established definition of nature.
Therefore, ecocriticism puts forth the idea that man is not master of the nature. It is not a slave as well.
Ecocritical literary criticism points out the importance of re-reading major literary texts in order to subvert our antropocentric view of the world.
They also put emphasis on the relationship among man,
culture and nature. Ecocritics also discuss this relationship by using the concepts and terms of philosophy and biology. By doing so, they create an ecological consciousness and
compose an ecological ethics.
First Wave Ecocriticism (1970-1990) ManNature
• Ecocriticism’s first wave, rooted in deep ecology, tended to see nature and human beings as opposed to one another, and held that the proper response of environmental criticism should be to help protect the natural environment from the depredations of human culture.
The Second Wave Ecocriticism (1990-2000) Man=Nature
• Second wave ecocriticism which addressed itself to human concerns as well as nonhuman nature: to urban and suburban environments as well as to wilderness settings; and to all
types of literary texts, not just nature writing.
• Prompted by dialogue with the environmental justice
movement, second-wave literary critics no longer saw human beings and the environment as opposed to one another, but instead focused on the ways in which they were independent and mutually constitutive.
The 3rd Wave Ecocriticism (2000- ) ManNature
• The 3rd wave of ecocriticism will continue to build on the development in the 2nd wave: deconstructing
the inherited opposition of ‘nature’ and the ‘human’
in which the former is priviledged and the latter is denigrated: exploring the social, economic and
physical dimensions of environmental process.
• The third wave also will examine ‘environmentality’
as a key tribute of all texts rather than ‘nature writing’.
• In addition, the 3rd wave ecocritics claim that ecocriticism is a multidisciplinary research
field and they propose miscellaneous research topics as:
• Ecofeminism Ecomarxism
• Eco(post)colonialism Ecocinema
• Posthumanism&ecocriticsm Ecotheatre
• Animal Studies Ecopedagogy
KEY CONCEPTS
• Anthropocentrism: the assumption or view that the interest of humans are of higher priority than those of non-humans.
Often used as an antonym for biocentrism or ecocentrism. It covers a multitude of possible positions, from positive
conviction (strong anthropocentrism) that human interests should prevail, to the belief that zero-degree
anthropocentrism is not feasible or desirable (weak anthropocentrism).
• So it is entirely possible without hypocrisy to
maintain biocentric values in principle while recognizing that in practice must be constrained by anthropocentric
considerations, whether as a matter of strategy or as a matter of intractable self-interestedness.
• Biocentrism : the view that all organisms, including humans, are part of a larger biotic web or network or community whose interests must constrain or direct the human interest. Used as a semi-synonym for
ecocentrism and in antithesis to anthropocentrism.
• Ecocentrism : the view in environmental ethics that the
interest of the ecosphere must override that of the interest of individual species. Used like the semi-synonymous
biocentrism in antithesis to anthropocentrism, but whereas biocentrism refers specifically to the world of
organisms, ecocentrism points to the interlinkage of the organismal and the inanimate.
• Ecocentrism covers a range of possible specific
ecophilosophies. In general, ecocentrists hold that
‘the world is an intrinsically dynamic,
interconnected web of relations” with “no absolute dividing lines between the living and the nonliving, the animate and the inanimate”. The origins of
modern ecocentric ethics are traceable to Aldo
Leopold, inventor of the “land ethic,” which enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils,
waters, plants and animals” (Leopold, 1949).
Phases of nature as follows:
•Area one: 'the wilderness' (e.g. deserts, oceans, uninhabited continents)
•Area two : 'the scenic sublime' (e.g. forests, lakes, mountains, cliffs, waterfalls)
•Area three: 'the countryside' (e.g. hills, fields, woods)
•Area four: 'the domestic picturesque'(e.g. parks, gardens, lanes)
What ecocritics do
•They re-read major literary works from an ecocentric
perspective, with particular attention to the representation of the natural world.
•They extend the applicability of the range of ecocentric
concepts, using them of things other than the natural world- concepts such as growth and energy, balance and imbalance, symbiosis and mutuality, and sustainable and unsustainable uses of energy and resources.
•They give special emphasis to writers who foreground nature as a major part of their subject matter, such as the American transcendentalist, the British Romantics.
• They extend the range of literary-critical practice by placing a new emphasis on 'factual' writing (Topographical) such as essays, travel writing, memoirs and regional literature.
• They turn away from the 'social constructivism' and 'linguistic determinism' of dominant literary theories and emphasize ecocentric values,
collective ethical responsibility, and the claims of the world beyond ourselves.
Questions for Basic Ecocritical Reading
•How is nature represented in this sonnet?
•What role does the physical setting play in the plot of this novel?
•Are the values expressed in this play consistent with ecological wisdom?
•How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it?
•How can we characterize nature writing as a genre?” (Glotfelty xviii-xix)
• The Garden Party by Katherine MANSFIELD
AND AFTER all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it.
Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimees in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat
rosetttes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that everybody is certain of
knowing.Hundreds, yes literally, hundreds, had come out in a single night (…)
• The story begins with a positive description of nature. The narrator tries to focus on the physical environment, and its favourable effects on people. However, it is possible to
conclude from the extract that Mansfield has an
antropocentric point of view in terms of ecocritical theory because she prefers to create a garden as a domestic
picturesque. Namely, the writer illustrates man’s endeavour to change nature for his own purposes by describing the
gardener’s efforts. Therefore, she glorifies man’s supremacy over the nature by separating man and nature. However, the garden should be read as a shelter created by man against nature in which he can only make small changes from the ecocritical perspective.
To sum up, Mansfield’s Garden Party implies the commonly accepted antropocentric view of man about nature.
Daffodils by W. Wordsworth
• I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
• The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company:
I gazed- and gazed- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.
