Concepts & Examples
"Ecocriticism," by Kate Rigby in Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002: 151-78.Premise:
Our embeddedness within an increasingly endangered earth.
History:
Between 1500 and 1800 --. . . a growing uneasiness about killing animals for food. Towards the end of the eighteenth century this change in sensibilities led some, including English poet Shelley, to become a vegetarian. (p. 151)
Modern Constitution (Bruno Latour 1993):
a) sunders the human from the non-human realm, while defining society's relationship to nature predominantly in terms of mastery and possession.
b) facilitates that characteristically modern (and especially urban) form of self-deception, whereby the consumption of meat can be disconnected from the suffering and death of animals. (p. 155)The Rise of Ecocriticism in late 20th century --
. . .it was not until the end of the 20th century that the study of literature and the environment was finally recognized as 'a subject on the rise.' (p. 152)Major claims & Issues:
1. they argue for the inter-relatedness of all factors within the ecosystem, from the social and the political to the phenomena of the natural world.
2. the ecocritics rigorously defend literature's capacity to refer to a natural reality, to realise the relations between landscape and lifestyle, and to remind us of non-human perspectives (of animals, trees, rivers, mountains) towards an "environmental literacy". (Hopkin)
(below: Rigby)
3. Thus to regain a sense of the inextricability of nature and culture, physis and techne, earth and artifact-consumption and destruction-would be too move beyond both the impasse of modernism and the arrangement of humanism.
4. (p. 155) . . . revalue the more-than-human natural world, to which some texts and cultural traditions invite us to attend.5. Critique of Current Critical Schools, e.g. Cultural Studies
Today's burgeoning cultural studies school, with its insistent and self-referential intellectualising, has demoted nature to the status of a linguistic construct, merely another text to be discussed and dismissed, severed from the natural reality to which it refers.
(Hopkin)
