Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

PMLA, 2006

2010

In recent years, ecocriticism has become one of the most visible and productive new directions of literary and cultural studies. Having originated in the United States as a minor, mostly regional form of environmentally oriented approach in the late 20 th century, it has since spread throughout literature departments, and become a successful new branch of the humanities not only in the U.S. and Europe but worldwide. At first, ecocriticism met with considerable resistance at first from a scholarly community that was deeply shaped by the theoretical fields of cultural studies, poststructuralism, and postmodernism 1. However, it has gained increasing recognition as an important new field of research and teaching that opens up a broad spectrum of new perspectives and that can help to reaffirm the relevance and responsibility of the humanities and of literary studies at a time when the process of globalization, and the concomitant globalization of knowledge and science, continue to be interpreted in primarily economic and technological terms. One of the most promising directions of ecocriticism, which has developed especially in Europe, is the approach of Cultural Ecology. From the perspective of the theory of science, Peter Finke"s Ökologie des Wissens (Ecology of Knowledge) is perhaps the most systematic presentation of this theory, which posits ecology as a paradigmatic perspective of knowledge not only for the natural sciences, but for cultural studies as well. Such an ecology of knowledge implies a unifying perspective in the sense that it brings together the various cultures of knowledge that have evolved in history, and that have been separated into more and more specialized disciplines and subdisciplines in the evolution of modern science. Indeed, if ecocriticism is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between culture and nature, then it must necessarily also face up to the challenge of a new dialogue between the "two cultures" of the natural sciences and the humanities. Disciplines on both sides of the divide thereby turn into "shifting hybrid domains," in which traditional disciplinary boundaries are blurred (Wilson Consilience 10). At the same time, this drive for the 1 There is, however, no binary opposition between the epistemologies of postmodernism and ecology, as Linda Hutcheon has pointed out, and as the later writings of Lyotard and Derrida among others demonstrate (Lyotard, Derrida).

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2010

Joni Adamson and I didn't realize we would spur such an eager response in the international community of ecocritics when we mentioned in our introduction to the Summer 2009 special issue of MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States the possibility that the current interest in exploring ethnicity through the study of environmental literature might represent one dimension of a new "third wave of ecocriticism." What we actually wrote in the MELUS introduction went as follows: Literary expression of environmental experience is as diverse as any other body of writing, of course. Yet until recently the community of ecocritics has been relatively non-diverse and also has been constrained by a perhaps overly narrow construing of "white" and "non-white" as the primary categories of ethnicity. Therefore, this issue will explore what seems to be a new third wave of ecocriticism, which recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries; this third wave explores all facets of human experience from an environmental viewpoint. (6-7) The articles collected in that issue seemed, for the most part, to be doing something different than ecocriticism we had observed during earlier phases of this scholeadarly discipline, focusing on cultural background and ethnic identity more intensely than had been the case in early ecocriticism, but also seeking to overcome the limiting, isoleadating focus on specific cultures as unique phenomena. The impulse to study human experience in relation to the more-than-human world and to compare human experience across cultures, in particular, struck us as an altogether different tendency than we had observed during the first two "waves" of the field. Let me back up for a moment and quickly outline, in general terms, the history of ecocriticism. The term "ecocriticism" was first used in William Rueckert's 1978 article "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism," and it is common, at least in North America, to mark the initial phase of ecocriticism as beginning around 1980 with the following principle foci: nonfiction "nature writing"; non-human nature and wilderness

2003

The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons, 2011

Veda Publications, 2015

The study of literature has long been preoccupied with historical approaches. However, in recent years critics are increasingly aware of the relation between literature and geography, and drawing insights from the mutual study of these two fields. Nature and literature have always shared a close relationship as is evidenced in the works of poets and other writers down the ages in almost all cultures of the world. The world of literature throngs with works dealing with beauty and power of nature. However, the concern for ecology and the threat that the continuous misuse of our environment poses on humanity have only recently caught the attention of the writers. It is this sense of concern and its reflection in literature that have given rise to a new branch of literary theory, namely Ecocriticism. This research paper gives a brief history of the gradual growth of Ecocriticism as a post-modern literary approach. Ecocritics lay emphasis on the preservation of landscape in order to save the human race. Ecocriticism not only lays emphasis on the 'harmony' of humanity and nature but also talks about the destruction caused to nature by the changes which take place in the modern world for most of which man is directly responsible. Ecocriticism is a fairly new concept but it has gained importance rapidly. More and more scholars have become aware of it and they are eager to do their research in the field of Ecocriticism and other areas associated with it. There have also been numerous debates on whether to include human culture in the physical world. Despite the broad scope of inquiry all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it.

NJES, 2016

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2009