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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.

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 publishes a journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)—in which current American scholarship can be found.

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

Evolution of ecocriticism in literary studies

Ecocritics investigate such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely, is meant by the word nature, and whether the examination of "place" should be a distinctive category, much like class, gender or race. Ecocritics examine human perception of wilderness, and how it has changed throughout history and whether or not current environmental issues are accurately represented or even mentioned in popular culture and modern literature. Scholars in ecocriticism engage in questions regarding anthropocentrism, and the "mainstream assumption that the natural world be seen primarily as a resource for human beings" as well as critical approaches to changing ideas in "the material and cultural bases of modern society." Other disciplines, such as history, economics, philosophy, ethics, and psychology, are also considered by ecocritics to be possible contributors to ecocriticism.

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism (Barry 240). In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism. His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature."

Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the ecological/environmental side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies etc. British marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature in 1973, The Country and the City.

Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy; that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the former to moral predominance. Such anthropocentrism is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker asserts, shows that a "comic mode" of muddling through and "making love not war" has superior ecological value. In the later, "second wave" ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological and historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.

As Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed…Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, ecocriticism—unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms—failed to crystallize into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s.

In the mid-1980s, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function. In 1990, at the University of Nevada, Reno, Glotfelty became the first person to hold an academic position as a professor of Literature and the Environment, and UNR has retained the position it established at that time as the intellectual home of ecocriticism even as ASLE has burgeoned into an organization with thousands of members in the US alone. From the late 1990s, new branches of ASLE and affiliated organizations were started in the UK, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ), India (OSLE-India), Taiwan, Canada and Europe.

Definition

In comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry, and canonical literature to take in film, television, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has borrowed methodologies and theoretically informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.

Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment", and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing". Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis”.

Simon Estok noted in 2001 that “ecocriticism has distinguished itself, debates notwithstanding, firstly 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”.

More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function–thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise–of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds”. This echoes the functional approach of the cultural ecology branch of ecocriticism, which analyzes the analogies between ecosystems and imaginative texts and posits that such texts potentially have an ecological (regenerative, revitalizing) function in the cultural system.

As Michael P. Cohen has observed, “if you want to be an ecocritic, be prepared to explain what you do and be criticized, if not satirized.” Certainly, Cohen adds his voice to such critique, noting that one of the problems of ecocriticism has been what he calls its “praise-song school” of criticism. All ecocritics share an environmentalist motivation of some sort, but whereas the majority are 'nature endorsing', some are 'nature sceptical'. In part this entails a shared sense of the ways in which 'nature' has been used to legitimise gender, sexual and racial norms (so homosexuality has been seen as 'unnatural', for example), but it also involves scepticism about the uses to which 'ecological' language is put in ecocriticism; it can also involve a critique of the ways cultural norms of nature and the environment contribute to environmental degradation. Greg Garrard has dubbed 'pastoral ecology' the notion that nature undisturbed is balanced and harmonious, while Dana Phillips has criticised the literary quality and scientific accuracy of nature writing in "The Truth of Ecology". Similarly, there has been a call to recognize the place of the Environmental Justice movement in redefining ecocritical discourse.

In response to the question of what ecocriticism is or should be, Camilo Gomides has offered an operational definition that is both broad and discriminating: "The field of enquiry that analyzes and promotes works of art which raise moral questions about human interactions with nature, while also motivating audiences to live within a limit that will be binding over generations" (16). He tests it for a film (mal)adaptation about Amazonian deforestation. Implementing the Gomides definition, Joseph Henry Vogel makes the case that ecocriticism constitutes an "economic school of thought" as it engages audiences to debate issues of resource allocation that have no technical solution. Ashton Nichols has recently argued that the historical dangers of a romantic version of nature now need to be replaced by "urbanatural roosting," a view that sees urban life and the natural world as closely linked and argues for humans to live more lightly on the planet, the way virtually all other species do.

See also

• Cultural ecology
• Critical theory
• Ecolinguistics
• Ethnobiology
• Animal studies
• Ecosophy

Sources

Barry, Peter. "Ecocriticism". Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Buell, Lawrence. "Toxic Discourse." Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 639-665 .

Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.

Cohen, Michael P. “Blues in Green: Ecocriticism Under Critique.” Environmental History 9. 1 (January 2004): 9-36.

Coupe, Laurence, ed. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2000.

Cranston, CA. & Robert Zeller, eds. "The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers". New York: Rodopi, 2007.

Estok, Simon C. (2001). “A Report Card on Ecocriticism.” AUMLA 96 (November): 200-38.

Estok, Simon C. (2005). “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: An Analysis of ‘Home’ and ‘Power’ in King Lear.” AUMLA 103 (May 2005): 15-41.

Forns-Broggi, Roberto. “La aventura perdida del ecopoema” in Fórnix 5/6 (2007): 376-394. (in Spanish)

Frederick, Suresh. Contemporary Contemplations on Ecoliterature. New Delhi:Authorpress, 2012.

Garrard, Greg, Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm (Eds). The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens and London: University of Georgia, 1996.

Gomides, Camilo. 'Putting a New Definition of Ecocriticism to the Test: The Case of The Burning Season, a film (mal)Adaptation". ISLE 13.1 (2006): 13-23.

Heise, Ursula K. “Greening English: Recent Introductions to Ecocriticism.” Contemporary Literature 47.2 (2006): 289–298.

Indian Journal of Ecocriticism

Kroeber, Karl. Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964.

McKusick, James C. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. New York: St. Martin's, 2000.

Meeker, Joseph W. "The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology." New York: Scribner's, 1972.

Moore, Bryan L. Ecology and Literature: Ecocentric Personification from Antiquity to the Twenty-first Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Nichols, Ashton. "Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting." New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Paperback, 2012.

Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1959.

Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Rueckert, William. "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism." Iowa Review 9.1 (1978): 71-86.

Rojas Pérez, Walter. La ecocrítica hoy. San José, Costa Rica: Aire Moderno, 2004.

Selvamony, Nirmal, Nirmaldasan & Rayson K. Alex. Essays in Ecocriticism. Delhi: Sarup and Sons and OSLE-India, 2008.

Slovic, Scott. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez. Salt Lake City, UT: University of Utah Press, 1992.

Vogel, Joseph Henry. "Ecocriticism as an Economic School of Thought: Woody Allen's Match Point as Exemplary." OMETECA: Science and Humanities 12 (2008): 105-119.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.

Zapf, Hubert. "Literary Ecology and the Ethics of Texts." New Literary History 39.4 (2008): 847-868.

External links

• Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment
• Journal of Ecocriticism
• Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment
• Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism
• Canadian Poetry: Documents/Studies/Reviews, No. 55 (Fall/Winter 2004): Ecocriticism and Contemporary Canadian Poetry
• "Dinnseanchas", Eamonn Wall, Berfrois, 17 March 2011
• "GIECO: Grupo de Investigación en Ecocrítica"
• Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES)

Category:Literary criticism Category:Environmental humanities Category:Environmental studies

Proposed Changes to the Ecocriticism Article

I'm very interested in revising this article to bring up its quality. Here are some things I have been considering working on (admittedly it will take some time to get to all of these changes). I'd welcome any comments or suggestions as I'm working!

Preliminary Proposed Changes to this Article

1. In the current lead section, add a qualifier to the sentence about “brainstorming possible solutions,” as this is a hotly debated issue within ecocriticism. Many scholars argue that this is not and should not be the goal of ecocriticism, while a large community of scholars propose to do just this.
2. Add that Ecocriticism has institutional connections to English departments and is often a secondary area of study in English literature as well as Rhetoric and Composition.
3. Explain that ASLE does not only host American scholarship.
4. Change the current organization of the page: move the “definition” section up to precede the “evolution in literary studies” section for better flow of information.
5. Additions to the definition section: change the sentence about there being “relatively little dispute about the philosophical and moral aims of ecocriticism.” There is actually much contestation, with scholars such as Timothy Morton suggesting that “there is no nature” and other critics arguing the precise role of literary environmentalism, particularly from the standpoint that the West either has a moral responsibility to enact a leadership role because of its consumerism/materialism, or that this is a form of Eco-Imperialism.
6. Discuss issues of class, race, and gender in connection to Ecocriticism and explain the subcategories, such as Ecofeminism, EcoMarxism, etc. Cite various examples of film and literature that make up these sub-genres.
7. Much of the article focuses on ecocriticism as the study of “nature” and “natural” things, but these are contested terms in the field. Explain.
8. Note the role of technology and manmade environments in eco-studies.
9. Cite The Environmental Justice Reader to contextualize the sentence on environmental justice at the end of the definition section.
10. In the “evolution” section: Make a distinction between romantic ecology and newer forms of ecocriticism, including Ursula K. Heise, Ulrich Beck, and Bruno Latour.
11. Discuss Marx’s The Machine in the Garden and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Show timeline of ideas from Romanticism in Britain to Transcendentalism in the U.S. as major factors in the current Ecocriticism.
12. Add to bibliography (see source list)

Tentative Source List

Examples of Fiction

• Austin, Mary. “The Scavengers” from Land of Little Rain (1903)
• Ballard, J.G. The Drowned World
• Bowen, Elizabeth. The Last September
• Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street (Random House, 1984)
• Danielewski, Mark. House of Leaves
• DeLillo, Don. White Noise
• Forster, E.M. A Passage to India
• Hogan, Linda. Solar Storms
• Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook
• Morrison, Toni. A Mercy
• Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio
• Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight
• Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle
• Spark, Muriel. The Driver’s Seat; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• Toomer, Jean. Cane
• Woolf, Virginia. Orlando; Mrs. Dalloway
• Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997)

Examples of Poetry

• D. H. Lawrence, Robot Poems
• Li-Young Li, The City In Which I Love You (1990)
• ---, Behind My Eyes (2008)
• Anne Fisher-Wirth and Laura Gray Street, eds., Ecopoetry Anthology (2013)
• Countée Cullen, Helene Johnson, and Edward Silvera. From the Dark Tower: A Collection of Poetry
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc”
• Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
• William Wordsworth, Michael and The Prelude

Non-Fiction Ecocriticism

• Wendell Berry, from The Gift of the Good Land
• Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011)
• Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)
• Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
• Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings (2000)
• John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911)
• ---, 1,000 Mile Walk to the Gulf
• Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)
• John Muir, from Our National Parks
• Jeff Ripple and Susan Cerulean, The Wild Heart of Florida (1999)
• Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)
• Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge (1992)
• ---, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert (2001)

Important Theory and Criticism

• Adamson, Joni, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein. The Environmental Justice Reader (Intro; “Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism”; “From Environmental Justice Literature to the Literature of Environmental Justice”; “Nature’ and Environmental Justice”) (2002)
• Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self
• Arendt, Hannah. “Labor, Work, Action”
• Auge, Marc. Non-places: An Introduction to Supermodernity.
• Adams, Carol J., and Josephine Donovan, Women and Animals: Feminist Theoretical Examinations
• Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space
• Bate, Jonathan. from Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition
• Beck, Ulrich. “Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity”
• Bryson, Scott, and John Elder. Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (Intro) (2002)
• Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism
• Darwin, Charles. from The Origin of Species
• DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Postcolonial Ecologies (2011)
• Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2011)
• Coetzee, J.M. from The Lives of Animals
• Cresswell, Tim. In Place/out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression; Place: A Short Introduction
• Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness”
• De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life; “Spatial Stories”; “Walking in the City”
• Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am”
• Diamond, Irene, and Gloria Feman Orenstein. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism
• Dumont, Rene. “Manifesto for an Alternative Culture”
• Engels, Friedrich. from The Conditions of the Working Class
• Evans, Mei Mei. “’Nature’ and Environmental Justice”
• Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979
• Foerster, Norman. Nature in American Literature
• Foster, John Bellamy. Marx’s Ecology (2000)
• Gaard, Gretta. Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature
• Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism (2011)
• Gatta, John. Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, And Environment in America
• Gifford, Terry. “The Social Construction of Nature” (ISLE) 13.2 (1996): 27-35.; “Three Kinds of Pastoral” form Pastoral
• Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996)
• Gray, Elizabeth Dodson. Green Paradise Lost (1979)
• Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008); “The Hitchiker’s Guide to Ecocriticism”; “Local Rock and Global Plastic”
• Halberstam and Livingston. Posthuman Bodies
• Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature; “The Cyborg Manifesto”; “Situated Knowledges”; The Haraway Reader
• Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
• Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology”; “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”
• Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffan, Postcolonial Ecocriticism
• Huggan, Graham. “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives” in Modern Fiction Studies
• Ishimure, Michiko. “Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow”
• Jameson, Fredric. Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fiction (2005)
• Kant, Immanuel. from The Third Critique of Judgment
• Kerridge, Ricahrd. “Environmentalism and Ecocriticism”
• LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life
• Latour, Bruno. Remodelling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. (2007); “Why Political Ecology Has Let Go of Nature”
• Leach, Neil. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, 1997.
• Lehan, Richard Daniel. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.
• LeGuin, Ursula K. “Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences”; “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”
• Lippard, Lucy R. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: New, 1997.
• Locke, John. from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
• Love, Glen A. Practical Ecocriticism. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003.
• Lovejoy, Arthur. “Some Meanings of Nature”; “Nature as Aesthetic Norm”
• Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in American Culture
• McKinnen, Bill. from The End of Nature
• Meeker, Joseph. The Comedy of Survival
• Merchant, Carolyn. Radical Ecology
• Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961
• Naess, Arne. “The Deep Ecological Movement” and “The Deep Ecology ‘Eight Points’ Revisited”
• Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind
• Nichols, Ashton. Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
• Outka, Paul. Race and Nature From Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance
• Plant, Edith. Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism
• Phillips, Dana. from The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America
• Pollan, Michael. from Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
• Ramachandra, Guha. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997)
• Rousseau, Jean Jacques. from A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind
• Shepard, Paul. “Ecology and Man – A Viewpoint”
• Shiva, Vandana. from Biopiracy
• Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage, 1996.
• Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination”
• Spinoza, Baruch. from the Ethics
• Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity, 1993.
• Thrift, Nigel J. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Milton Park: Routledge, 2008.
• Tsing, Anna. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Chapters 3-5, Section II, “Knowledge”)
• Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topohilia (1974)
• White, Lynn, Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”
• Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City; “Ideas of Nature” from Culture and Materialism
• ---. “Key Terms in Ecocriticism and New Historicism”
• Zimmerman, Michael. “Rethinking the Heidegger – Deep Ecology Relationship”

I plan to cite many of these works and include links where appropriate.