Ecocriticism

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Ecocriticism

• Camelia Elias Søren Hattesen Balle
• e-mail camelia_at_hum.aau.dk
• shb_at_hum.aau.dk
• http//www.hum.aau.dk/camelia/

Room 1.115
Fridays 10.00-11.45.00
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Reasons for its emergence

• Global environmental and ecological crisis in the
  post-WWII period Risikogesellschaft (Ulrich
  Beck)
• The greening of academic studies since the
  1970s
• Resistance to the cultural and textual turn
  of late 20th century literary studies race,
  class and gender issues

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Jonathan Bate (1991)

• Alan Liu writes that nature is the name under
  which we use the nonhuman to validate the human,
  to interpose a mediation able to make humanity
  more easy with itself
• However, Liu links this statement to the claim
  that There is no nature, in other words that
  nature is nothing more than an anthropomorphic
  construct created by Wordsworth and the rest for
  their own purposes.

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Jonathan Bate (1991)

• The polemical desire to reject any casual
  recourse to nature as panacea for social ills
  has the unfortunate consequences of occluding any
  consideration of the question of human societys
  stewardship of the features and products of the
  earth itself, as contrasted with those of human
  civilization (OEDs thirteenth sense of the
  word).
• There is no nature at a time when our most
  urgent need is to address and redress the
  consequences of human civilizations insatiable
  desire to consume the products of the earth.

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Theoretical background

• Romanticism natural philosophy and organicism
• Nature writing (American) creative non-fictional
  genre of writing natural science and
  romanticism
• Whatever the artistic means chosen, and
  whatever the type of essay we may choose to call
  a certain piece of nature writing, the
  fundamental goal of the genre is to turn our
  attention outward to the activity of nature.
  (Thomas J. Lyon, 1989)

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William Wordsworth (1798)

• For I have learned
• To look on nature, not as in the hour
• Of thoughtless youth but hearing oftentimes
• The still, sad music of humanity,
• Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
• To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
• A presence that disturbs me with the joy
• Of elevated thoughts a sense sublime
• Of something far more deeply interfused,

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William Wordsworth (1798)

• Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
• And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
• A motion and a spirit, that impels
• All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
• And rolls through all things. Therefore am I
  still
• A lover of the meadows and the woods,
• And the mountains and of all that we behold
• From this green earth of all the mighty world
• Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create,
• And what perceive well pleased to recognize

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William Wordsworth (1798)

• The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse
• The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
• Of all my moral being.

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Theory

• Text
• No purely cultural object
• affected by the material conditions of the
  natural environment (the ecosphere)
• affecting the material conditions of the natural
  environment (the ecosphere)
• Privileging of the ecopoetic text over and
  against the anthropocentric text (ecology vs.
  economy)

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Theory

• Text-context
• dependence text depends upon natural context
  as its original referent
• interconnection, integration,
  interdependence, etc. between text and nature
• nature an oikos (house) where all things and
  beings originally belong

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Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (1996)

• all ecological criticism shares the
  fundamental premise that human culture is
  connected to the physical world, affecting it and
  affected by it.
• Ecocriticism takes as its subject the
  interconnections between nature and culture,
  specifically the cultural artifacts of language
  and literature.
• As a critical stance, it has one foot in
  literature and the other on land as a
  theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the
  human and the nonhuman.

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Theory

• Text-reader
• the ecological lesson of the ecopoetic text
• the ecopoetic text as an ethical platform for
  ecologically responsible action

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Method

• Study of symbolic representations of nature
• Establishment of a green canon
• Development of an ecological poetics and theory
• anthropocentrism in Western literature
• the symbolic construction of nature, gender,
  sexuality, race, and class in literature
• naturalization of literary language
• ecological ethics of literature

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Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (1996)

• Glen A. Love first speculates that literary
  studies have remained indifferent to the
  environmental crisis in part because our
  disciplines limited humanistic vision has led to
  a narrowly anthropocentric view of what is
  consequential in life.
• He then recommends that revaluing nature-oriented
  literature can help redirect us from
  ego-consciousness to eco-consciousness.

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Jonathan Bate (1991)

• What, then, are the politics of our relationship
  to nature? For a poet, pastoral is the
  traditional mode in which that relationship is
  explored.
• Patoral has not done well in recent neo-Marxist
  criticism, but if there is to be an ecological
  criticism the language that is ever green must
  be reclaimed.
• I would suggest that Wordsworth built an
  account of the pastoral into the pivotal
  retrospective eighth book of The Prelude in order
  to forge a link between the holistic values of
  his native vales and the social meliorism that
  underlay the French Revolution.

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Study questions

• Henry David Thoreau, Walking (1862)
• How is walking thematized in the essay? How
  does walking structure the essay? To which
  extent is the discourse of the essay an example
  of walking?
• Comment on the many references to speaking (It
  is said, We have heard, I wish to speak,
  etc.), letters, names, words, sayings, fables,
  mythology, gospels, poetry, literature, laws,
  etc.
• How do intertextuality and poetic language
  function in the essay? To which extent do they
  suggest a connection between word and world?
• What does Nature represent in the essay? Can
  you interpret it within an ecocritical framework?
• Which image or symbolic representation of
  nature does Thoreau construct?