1.1 What is ecocriticism
The starting-point for the ecocriticism is acknowledging that there really is an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and that this crisis pos some of the great political and cultural questions of our time.1 So the challenge environmentalism pos to literature is this: show how it feels, here and now. Make contact between the public and the personal, in accordance with the Green maxim: “Think globally, act locally.”2
Even today, in the early twenty-first century, there are tho who look at the world as if nature were inexhaustible and pristine, despite the phenomenon of industrial revolution, which has radically depleted a broad range of nature resources, contributed to the extinction or endangerment of numerous plant and animal species, and spewed vast quantities of toxins into the environment.雅思培训在哪里3
Ecological disaster is a punishment for human transgression: the necessary conquence of going too far, tampering with nature, usurping the pace of divine providence. Often this p
measurementerception leads to the idea that the conquences will worn until humanity is forced to return to a more “natural” way of life.4
ria sakuraiThe real, material ecological crisis is also a cultural crisis, a crisis of reprentation. The inability of political cultures to address environmentalism is in part a failure of narrative. Yet the concerns will not be kept out of narrative. Environmental preoccupations are registering, now, across a wide range of texts and discours, some of them not obviously concerned with ecology or “nature”5coined by the German biologist Ernest Haekel in 1869, the term ecology has since gained a wide popularity only a century later, and its key concept has been a common assumption of nature-conscious people in the cond half of the twentieth century: “All units of the ecosystem are mutually dependent. This is a good point to keep in mind when we are tempted to extol the importance of some group of organisms in which we happen to be especially interested.” Humankind is “a part of ‘complex’ biological cycles”6 dependent on the food web of eating and being eaten. It may em obvious that ecological problems are scientific problems rather than o
be truebjects of cultural analysis. However, according to John Passmore, ‘ecological problems’ are “features of our society, arising out of our dealings with nature, from which we should like to free ourlves, and which we do not regard as inevitable conquences of what is good in that society.”7
tapenadeAn ecological perspective strives to e how all things are interdependent, even tho apparently most parate. Nothing may be discarded or buried without conquences. Literature is not leisure, not parate from science or politics, any more than “nature” can be parate from human life, or someone’s backyard be immune from pollution. There are local ecosystems, but all are subject to the global ecosystem, a totality which excludes nothing and can be rid of nothing.8endeavor
Early beginnings of a distinctly contemporary, consciously environmentalist criticism, with its “spirit of commitment to environmental praxis,” first stirred in the 1960s, in widespread public concerns over nuclear annihilation, runaway population growth, loss of wild and natural areas, accelerated species extinction, and increasing contamination of the earth’s
air, water, and land.9 By the end of the sixties the word ecology had surfaced from a subfield of biology to encompass the same root conflict who history and cultural implications. Environmentalism, an awkward media term, signified not only a part of the pervasive political and social unrest of a decade, but a permanent national and global concern, a check to a blind faith in progress and to the juggernaut of technology. The prent state of this movement, for which the blanket term ecocriticism has come to be accepted, is one of ferment and experimentation. What is emerging is a multiplicity of approaches and subjects, including---under the big tent of environmental literature---nature writing, deep ecology, the ecology of cities, ecofeminism, the literature of toxicity, environmental justice, bioregionalism, the lives of animals, the revaluation of place, interdisciplinarity, eco-theory, the expansion of the canon to include previously unheard voices, and the reinterpretation of canonical works from the past. As Buell notes, “the phenomenon of literature-and-environment studies is better understood as a congeries of mioverlapping projects than as a unitary approach or t of claims”10
A coherent and broadly bad movement embracing literary-environmental interconnections is commonly termed “ecocriticism.”英孚在线学习网址11 As a method of literary analysis, ecocriticism emerged in the late twentieth century as a means of investigating the relation between literary texts and their environmental contexts. The 1992 founding of the new Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and in 1995 the publication of ASLE’s journal, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE) are generally regarded as the landmark of ecocriticism. The term “ecocriticism” was first devid in 1978 by William Rueckert in his pioneering essay, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.”中国国际广播电台12Rachel Carson sparked the formation with the publication of her book Silent Spring (1962). According to Greg Garrard, the rhetorical strategies, u of pastoral and apocalyptic imagery and literary allusions with which Carson shapes her scientific material may well be amenable to a more ‘literary’ or ‘cultural’ analysis.消极的13 Such analysis is called ‘ecocriticism’:
What then is ecocriticism? Simply put, ecocriticism is the study of relationship between lit
erature and the physical environment. As feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender conscious perspective and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.14美容师培训学校
Ecocriticism is naturally an avowedly political mode of analysis. Ecocritics generally tie their cultural analys explicitly to a ‘green’ moral and political agenda. In this respect, ecocriticism is cloly related to environmentally oriented developments in philosophy and political theory. Developing the insight of earlier critical movements, ecofeminists, social ecologists and environmental justice advocates ek a synthesis of environmental and social concerns. Richard Kerridge’s definition in the mainly British Writing the Environment (1998) suggests a broader cultural ecocriticism:
