Thinking Activity: Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism Theory

Hello readers

👉Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including "green (cultural) studies", "ecopoetics", and "environmental literary criticism".

👉DEFINITION

👉Cheryl Glot-felty

"Ecocriticism WA is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment"

👉According to M.H.Abram's A Glossary of Literary Terms

Ecocriticism was a term coined in the late 1970s by combining “criticism” with a shortened form of “ecology”—the science that investigates the interrelations of all forms of plant and animal life with each other and with their physical habitats. 

“Ecocriticism” (or by alternative names, environmental criticism and green studies) designates the critical writings which explore the relations between literature and the biological and physical environment, conducted with an acute awareness of the damage being wrought on that environment by human activities. 

👉Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. Ecocriticism was officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works, both published in the mid-1990s: The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, and The Environmental Imagination, by Lawrence Buell.

👉In the United States, Ecocriticism is often associated with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), which hosts biennial meetings for scholars who deal with environmental matters in literature. ASLE has an official journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)—in which much of the most current American scholarship in the rapidly evolving field of ecocriticism can be found.

👉Key Concerns of Eco criticism

1. reigning religions and philosophies of Western civilization are deeply anthropocentric
2. Prominent in ecocriticism is a critique of binaries such as man/nature or culture/nature, viewed as mutually exclusive oppositions. 
3.  Many ecocritics recommend, and themselves exemplify, the extension of “green reading” (that is, analysis of the implications of a text for environmental concerns and toward political action) to all literary genres, including prose fiction and poetry, and also to writings in the natural and social sciences. 
4. There is a growing interest in the animistic religions of so-called “primitive” cultures, as well as in Hindu, Buddhist, and other religions and civilizations that lack the Western opposition between humanity and nature, and do not assign to human beings dominion over the nonhuman world.

👉Seminal Writers and their works

• James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–30)-long poem in blank verse 
• Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac -(1949), drawing attention to the ominous degradation of the environment
• Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962)-concerning the devastation inflicted by newly developed chemical pesticides on wildlife, both on land and in water.
• Wendell Berry wrote in The Unsettling of America (1977), 
• Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,”

👉Example

Snake by D.H.Lawrence

👉Snake is probably the most famous poem in the collection and captures the moment a man encounters a snake at a water trough.The narrator is in two minds about the snake, in some parts of the poem he seems to be admiring the snake referring to him as a “king” and “god”, and in others “the voice of [his] education [is saying to him] He must be killed”. We can see Lawrence representing both these ‘minds’ or states of consciousness through the admiration yet fear of the snake.

 👉Looking at Snake through an eco-critical lens, Lawrence appears to be highlighting the disturbed balance between nature and humans, condemning how we have come into their habitat yet are taught to scare them out of it instead of living harmoniously.

Thank you.