Ecocriticism

 

        ECOCRITICISM

 

 In Cheryll Glotfelty’s words, Ecocriticism is ‘the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment'. It is an interdisciplinary project which analyzes how the environment is represented in literature. It examines how the human treats the nonhuman around them and investigates possible solutions for the current environmental crisis. While the American version is commonly designated as Ecocriticism, the British school is known as Green Studies.

The beginning of Ecocriticism can be traced back in the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 against the ill-effects of agricultural and industrial toxic-residue. It was a wakeup call for action against the existing but inconsistent patterns of development.

Critics considered that the first wave of Ecocriticism was forth with Deep ecology. It believes in the fundamental interconnectedness of all forms of life. It is an extreme form of ecological thinking in which humans are considered as only one species among many in the environment and large numbers of humans are seen as harmful to the environment in which they live. Contrary to anthropocentric thinking, deep ecology envisages emotional responses to nature, rather than the rational approach of man-centred philosophy. It follows that the value of non-human life is not dependent upon their usefulness to the humans .The ignoring of the non-human in contemporary systems is based on the notion that it possesses no intrinsic value in itself, unlike the humans. Any increase in human population is a threat to both the worlds.. In consequence, there is a radical demand for introducing policy changes to reduce human activity and interference on nature. Thus, there is a love for all forms of life, landscapes and counter-cultures.

Regarding the origin of the movement in the US, it can be traced back to American Transcendentalism. The movement took a profound interest in the nature-oriented life and theories of the scholars of the 1840s like Ralph Emerson, Henry Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. Though Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard in the 20th century too continued this tradition, it was through a renewed interest in the alternative cosmology or ecology of the Native Americans that industrial capitalism, anthropocentrism and cultural hegemony of the dominant white culture came under scrutiny. However, the term ecocriticism had been first used by the critic William Rueckert as early as 1978.

Ecocriticism, in the modern sense, was founded by Glotfelty, with the publication of The Ecocriticism Reader (1992). In fact, ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) founded in 1992 along with its journal ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) established in 1993, became a global platform to discuss environmental matters in literature and contemporary culture.

The roots of Green Studies can be located back to Wordsworth and other romantic poets. The Country and the City (1973) by Raymond Williams was an 'ecocritical text before the term was invented. With Jonathan Bate's Romantic Ecology (1991) and Laurence Coupe's The Green Studies Reader (2000), Green Studies became a popular academic concern in the universities.

Ecocriticism, was characterized by a profound distrust of the basic assumptions of theory which argued that all realities are linguistically; and, or, socially constructed. To ecocritics, nature cannot be reduced to a concept emerging in the structural or poststructural theories. Kate Soper's statement that 'It isn't language which has a hole in its ozone layer' underlines the necessity to free nature from the status of an ideological and cultural construct, to a material and objective reality.

The word 'nature' is the most problematic term to be defined and analyzed in ecocriticism with its binary opposite 'culture'. The central ecocritical position focuses on the materiality of nature and culture, and asserts that humanity's intervention has a stake in both of them. Ecocriticism sees it pointless to work for the welfare of humanity in the domain of gender, race and class/caste, ignoring the environment - the fundamental premise of all other liberation. (However, Social ecology and Ecofeminism are attempting to integrate both the realms.)

The context of the emergence of environmentalism is the growing doubt in anthropocentrism which places humanity as the centre of everything. Ecocentrism, which emerged as the counterpoint to the human-centeredness of industrial capitalism and other western paradigms, on the contrary, places the eco system - including the nonhuman -at the centre. An ecosystem is a purely ‘acentric' project, with no hierarchical divisions like the centre and the margin, the top and the bottom, and foreground or background. In literary discourses, it demands, landscape should not function as a background or setting, but as an integral part of the narrative.

In ecocritical literary criticism, there is naturally a focus on those texts exploring nature like Walden and Sakuntalam. Apart from focusing on this obvious concern, the ecocritics search for the unaddressed nature content in it. For example, The Tempest could be read as a text that characterizes two world views: The supernatural/ artist, Prospero (culture) who tries to dominate 'the fish smelling Caliban (nature). Ariel, with whom Prospero performs magic also refers to the domain of earth which the Renaissance (hu)man tried to control forever. Another approach of ecocriticism is turning the inside of a text out by revealing the relations between the complex psyche of 'man' as a product of the backgrounded nature.

The major engagements of the ecocritics, according to Peter Barry's Beginning Theory are:

1.      They re-read major literary works from an ecocentric perspective, with particular attention to the representation of the natural world.

2.      They extend the applicability of a range of ecocentric concepts such as growth and energy, balance and imbalance, symbiosis and mutuality, and sustainable or unsustainable uses of energy and resources.

3.      They give special canonical emphasis to writers who foreground nature as a major part of their subject matter, such as the American transcendentalists, the British Romantics, the poetry of John Clare, the work of Thomas Hardy and the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century.

4.      They extend the range of literary-critical practice by placing a new emphasis on relevant 'actual writing, especially reflective topographical material such as essays, travel writing, memoirs, and regional literature.

5.      They turn away from the 'social constructivism' and 'linguistic determinism' of dominant literary theories and instead emphasize ecocentric values of careful observation, collective ethical responsibility, and the claims of the world beyond ourselves.