Practical Ecocriticism (book review)

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).

2003

Environmental History, 2004

Nature, Literature and the Environment: Ecocriticism Analysis

PMLA, 2006

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2009

Th e article sketches a brief overview of the American 11a111re-writi11g tradition, with reference to Thomas Lyon's useful taxonomy of 11at11re writing, offering an 11pda1ed contextualization of this tradition 1ha1 takes into account the emergence of modern e11viron111e111alis111 in American cu/Jure. Ecoliterature can be unders tood to encompass no/ 011/y ideologically driven works of literary envi-ro11111entalis111, but also strains of rece111 nature writing !hat in one way or another serve 10 foreground !he no11-h1.1111an environing world and may even explore con-ceptua/izalions of nature and culture (especially 1he 11a1ure-c11/ture i11Je1.face) anywhere along a moderate-to-radical continuum of engagement in environmental ethics or applied principles of ecology. The rise of ecolilerature in /are 20'" cenflll)' American fellers is also discussed in relation to an emergent lradition of environmental literal)' criticism, or ecocriticism, as ii has come lo be more...

2007

Environment by Glen A. Love reviewed by Harold Fromm ike Moliere's M. Jourdain speaking prose without knowing it, classic writers were unwittingly doing ecocriticism for centuries before the genre burst forth onto the academic scene in the early 1990s. From Virgil's Georgics to John Clare to Thoreau to Rachel Carson, sensitive people had actually noticed that they were living on and from the primal mud of Earth.