A Booklist of International Environmental Literature

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1999

THE FOLLOWING letters were submitted in response to a call for comments on the growing importance and expanding scope of the fields of environmental literature and ecological literary criticism.

Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, 2015

This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to the representation of environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role that narrative, visual, and aesthetic forms can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term and catastrophic environmental challenges such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, the pollution and management of the global commons, petrocapitalism, and the commodification of nature. The volume presents a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australasia and the Pacific, as well as North America, the volume includes essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars, providing vital new interdisciplinary perspectives on: the politics of the earth; disaster, vulnerability, and resilience; political ecologies and environmental justice; world ecologies; and the Anthropocene. In engaging critical ecologies, the volume poses a postcolonial environmental humanities for the twenty-first century. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

International Journal of Scientific Research in Science and Technology, 2023

Nature can’t speak for herself and thus time and again she retorts with calamities, making us vulnerable and impotent. This paper proposes to explore the various geopolitical and socio-political intricacies of man versus nature, which are portrayed by Indian English writers. The genuine concern for nature along with marginal demography and water habitats is the main focus around which Amitav Ghosh’s (2016)‘The Hungry Tides’ and Arundhati Roy’s (1999) ‘The Greater Common Good’ revolves. The paper aims at establishing intertextuality between the two texts focusing on the concerns of both the writers over nature and also depicting vulnerability of humans in front of the wrath of nature. The texts lack literary similarities but the theme revolves around interference of human beings in the disruption of the ecological balance and about the sufferings of the marginal people being a part of the broader nature encompassed in its thrall. Both authors bring forward to the global community issues which can damage nature and human beings bringing out the hidden socio-political reasons along with environmental concerns. As the paper proceeds, we will explore the tangible yet profound manifold relationship between human and nature. The true meaning of symbiosis is established not in the society of civilization but through roots that penetrate into the soil sustaining life. These discussions will be done through the mentioned literary texts to provide a basic guidance to researchers and fellow environmentalists before they venture into the world of the 'other'

students will learn how the natural world informed innovative writing about the environment and the imagination. They will gain an appreciation of 'nature' as a contested term, analysing and evaluating uses of the pathetic fallacy and more direct engagements with the nonhuman environment. Terms such as "the edge of the public way" (Wordsworth) will be critically considered, along with some essential ecocritical theories of poetry and the imagination.

Theory and Practice in Language Studies

The reciprocal relationship between humans and nature is determined based on their respective natures. This mutualism symbiosis is based on a relationship of use for mutual prosperity. Living together with nature means living in cooperation, mutual help and tolerance. The whole relationship becomes an inseparable entity; all things are interrelated and functional and have the same goal of protecting and preserving nature. Protecting the environment is key to the survival of fragile ecosystems, wildlife, and even humankind. However, the endless human needs often make humans act excessively, exploiting the environment as much as possible to meet the needs of life, resulting in severe environmental damage. This is the rationale for raising the theme of environmental conservation through literary media by referring to the concept and theory of eco-literature. The whole research is conducted using a qualitative descriptive method that focuses on content analysis, revealing the concept of...

2015

All work rests on other work, sometimes evident in the fi nal product and sometimes invisible. First, we want to thank Shannon Brennan for her meticulous indexing and Catherine Zusky for her painstaking transcription of our interview with Elaine Scarry. We want to thank Elaine Scarry for her generous commitment to the interview, during a busy season of winter holidays. We also wish to acknowledge the dual conferences that gave birth to the interview and to this volume. In May 2009, Elaine Scarry gave a keynote lecture at "Beyond Environmentalism: Culture, Justice, and Global Ecologies," a conference organized by Stephanie LeMenager at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with major funding from the UC Humanities Research Institute. Six other chapters from this volume refl ect the intimate and challenging conversations that took place at this conference, which also featured a brilliant keynote by Ursula Heise. In March 2009, Jill Casid offered a keynote lecture at "Before Environmentalism," a conference organized by Ken Hiltner and sponsored by the Early Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Several chapters in this volume refl ect the central goal of that conference, to explore early modern literary and cultural responses to the environmental issues that preceded and gave shape to modern environmentalism. Without the collegiality and vitality of our conference participants in both venues, this collection would not have gotten off the ground. Lawrence Buell's stunning lecture on environmental memory at UC-Santa Barbara, offered in November 2007, fi rst inspired our ambition to attempt the impossiblee.g., anthologizing a rapidly growing fi eld. Finally, we wish to thank the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), the professional organization that has made possible environmental criticism and our earnest conversation with it. Without the guidance of the good people at Routledge, too, we never would have found voice.

There can be little doubt that, in recent years, ecology has become one of the central discourses in the western world. Ecological issues are especially important in the social and natural sciences, who assume social and political responsibility by addressing urgent ecological problems and developing practicable and visionary solutions for them. From the perspective of cultural history, this begs the question which functions, concepts and paradigms of the relationship between nature and society can be found in literature and other forms of art, which relations those works bear to social reality and how this perspective in general can be successfully applied to our understanding of ecology. Certain parameters are already addressed in ancient literature, e.g. the opposition between human needs and the respect for the environment or the treatment of possible changes within nature, whose effects cannot easily be foreseen. Since then, these questions have undergone important historical changes, while at the same time remaining closely connected to their respective cultural and national contexts. In addition, one can observe that literature absorbs non-fictional discourses on ecology. The potential of new perspectives in literary and cultural studies on these issues becomes apparent if one applies Ette's concept of "Literature as Knowledge for Living", i.e. the notion that literature can precisely because of its fictional character develop, test and mediate different ecological constellations and concepts. After all, the critique of civilization, the dichotomy of nature and culture and the threat posed by forces of nature have always provided material for cultural debates on nature. These observations result in a set of questions: Which functions, which manifestations and which aesthetical treatments of connections between organisms can be found in literature and culture? How are ecological and economic concerns connected? What are the conflicts, what are the opportunities? How has the treatment of ecological issues in literature and art changed throughout history? How are current problems such as climate change addressed in literature and art? These are questions that will be raised and discussed at the XVI. Conference of the DGAVL. Thus, the goals are, firstly, to draw on existing research from the field of ecocriticism, secondly, to define and develop these approaches within a comparative perspective and, lastly, to discuss how our understanding of literature will change when discourses from literary criticism merge with those of other sciences. The term ecocriticism was first introduced by William Rueckert in his much-cited article "Literature and Ecology. An Experiment in Ecocriticism". Since then, ecocriticism has been a continually growing but also very divergent field in literary and cultural studies. Interest in nature and the relationship between mankind and nature or mankind and environment can be regarded as the common ground of these approaches. They have been well established in the Englishspeaking world for over 20 years now: The University of Nevada introduced the first chair for "Literature and Environment" as early as 1990. The US-American ASLE (Association for Study of Literature and Environment) was founded in 1992, its European counterpart EASLCE (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment) in 2004. In Germany, ecocriticism is well established most notably in English studies, but it is also grows in popularity in German studies, although here still rather isolated: Research mainly focused on concepts of nature in certain literary periods and on studies of works of one single author. It is striking that a distinctly comparative perspective has not been developed yet. It is the goal of the DGAVL-Conference in Saarbrücken to fill this gap. For this purpose, it can draw on current concepts of the newly DFG-funded network "Ethik und Ästhetik in literarischen Repräsentationen ökologischer Transformationen" ("Ethics and Aesthetics in literary representations of ecological transformations") under the direction of Evi Zemanek (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg). The conference will focus on an intercultural, intermedial, and interdisciplinary perspective on the connection between literature and ecology. Literature and Ecology -possible fields of interest for a comparative ecocriticism The following areas can be studied either from a diachronic/historic perspective or from a synchronic/systematic one and might constitute the main branches of a comparative approach to ecocriticism. Concepts of nature, environment, and space: The aesthetics, perception and experience of nature, nature as metaphor and its realization in literary texts constitute important aspects of a literary and cultural ecocriticism. The discursive treatment of environment (in its very basic concept of space surrounding the human) proves to be an important category, as well, because it can be constructed either as wilderness, desert, or eternal ice, among others. And yet ecocriticism is not limited to ostensibly 'natural' surroundings, but includes rather seemingly farfetched spaces as well, e.g. the city, private spheres, mental spaces or outer space worlds. Theory and methodology of ecocriticism:

Ecocene, 2022

2002