Making a summary for my notes

Ecocriticism

-During the last few decades, Environment has posed a great threat to human society as well as the mother earth. The extensive misuse of natural resources has left us at the brink of ditch. The rainforests are cut down, the fossil fuel is fast decreasing, the cycle of season is at disorder, ecological disaster is frequent now round the globe and our environment is at margin.

-Under these circumstances, there arose a new theory of reading nature writing during the last decade of the previous century called Ecocriticism. It is a worldwide emergent movement which came into existence as a reaction to man's anthropocentric attitude of dominating nature.

-We should make change in our attitude to nature. Literature does not float above life, so it has its role to play.

-The term ecocriticism was first coined by William Rueckert in his critical writing "Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism" in 1978.

-It also advocates systematic usages of natural resources like coal, gas, forests, oil, etc. for a sustainable future.

-Ecocriticism gives emphasis on this eco-consciousness removing the ego-consciousness man .The present environmental crisis is a bi-product of human culture.

-There are two waves of ecocriticism as identified by Lawrence Buell. The first

wave ecocritics focused on nature writing, nature poetry, and wilderness

fiction"(Buell 138)They used to uphold the philosophy of organism. Here

environment effectively means natural environment. (Buell 21)The aim of the

wave was to preserve 'biotic community'(Coupe 4)

-The second wave ecocritics inclined towards environmental justice issues and a 'social ecocriticism' that takes urban landscape as seriously as 'natural landscape' (Buell 22). This wave of ecocriticism is also known as revisionist ecocriticism. It seeks to locate the vestiges of nature in cities and exposes crimes of eco-injustice against society's marginal section.

-Ecocriticism is not merely the study of nature as represented in literature. Nature here does not mean a mere fancy of its beautiful aspects like plants and animals. Nature here means the whole of the physical environment consisting of the human and the nonhuman. The interconnection between the two creates a bond which is the basis of Ecocriticism. As long as there is a harmony between the living and the non-living, there prevails a healthy eco-system for the benevolence of mankind as well as the earth.

-Anthropocence vs Biosense: Human nature is essentially anthropocentric which positions humans on top. As earth's only literary being, man considers himself as superior to every other organism. But ecocriticism decentres humanity's importance to every object of environment. In ecology, man's tragic flaw is his anthropocentric as opposed to biocentric vision, and his compulsion to conquer , harmonise ,domesticate ,violate and exploit every natural thing. Anthropocentric assumes the primacy of humans, who either sentimentalise or dominate the environment. On the other hand, Biocentric decenters humanities importance explores the complex interrelationships between the human and the nonhuman.

-Nature vs Culture: One of the implicit goals of the ecocritics is to rethink the relationship between culture and nature Culture is associated with the geography of a landscape. Culture is something which has been created over the years by the people who have been living in an environment for ages. So long as man lived in close association with nature there will be no ecological threat. But with the advancement of science and technology man has got alienated from nature putting his own survival in a question. The natural environment is now replaced by the built up environment. Our global crisis is not because how ecosystems function. It is because how our ethical systems function. Getting through the crisis requires understanding our impact on nature. It requires understanding those ethical systems and using that understanding to reform them. (Ecocriticism Reader)

-Sustainable Development: Ecocriticism advocates sustainable development for a better future of mankind in general. All organisms have their right to survive in their own way. The plants, the animals, the women, the marginal, the tribal - all have their role to play to keep up the earth's basic life support system. Limited use of resources will ensure the safe and secured future of the generations to come.

-Environmental Justice: Ecocriticism underlines environmental justice as man's voracious urge to conquer nature is somewhat misleading. We used to believe ourselves to be superior to the other life forms that inhabit the biosphere. But now we realize that nature is not a subordinate but a co-inhabitant of this earth ecosystem. We should change our self-destructive motives. If humans try to destroy nature, they will be paid back by their own coins.

-What ecocritis Do: In order to meet with the present environmental crisis, the ecocritics play an important role in building up the eco-consciousness among the readers. For this they read major canonical writings; they look at the natural world differently than others. They shift our critical attention from the inner consciousness to the outer; rejects the belief that everything is socially or linguistically constructed: believes that Nature really exists beyond ourselves, but is with us and affects us(perhaps fatally if we mistreat it).

-Ecocriticism redefines our relationship with the environment and literature. It identifies roots of the problem of ecological crisis in the relationship of the society with nature and also the structure of the society inside. It’s also connected with social and economic justice. The loss of ecology has irreversible, intergenerational consequences. The protection of air, water, soil health and diverseness ought to be primary environmental imperatives. Environment impacts people’s day nowadays lives. quality of natural environment determines the standard of human life. Cultural survival of individuals depends upon integrates environmental practices. Environmental history and the ecological imagination suggest that today we are facing a global crisis not because of the function of ecosystems but because of the way our moral system works.

-Ecocriticism is an important step in bringing awareness to the environmental problem that the world faces today, but it only works if more people learn about it. The only way to change these mindset is to educate the world, and hopefully bring about a change in values.

-Characteristics of Ecocriticism: Peter Barry’s book Beginning Theory, writes that Ecocriticism has no universal model. It is still developing. The scholars are engaged in widening its nature and scope. Several characteristics are found from their approach to this theory. Ecocriticism is interdisciplinary although Ecocriticism emerged as a separate academic discipline of literary study during 1990’s, it is by its very nature interdisciplinary. It is not a unitary discipline. All science come together to contribute to this theory. Ecocriticism seeks to explore the interconnectedness of the human (biotic) and the non- human (a-biotic; finds the relationship between literature and the physical environment since antiquity. Therefore, both History and geography contribute to the field. It discovers ecological implication in literature, therefore, it is science; likewise it is related to politics(as it tries to find a solution to present global environmental crisis), spiritualism(as it helps developing and eco-wisdom among the readers), moral science, philosophy etc.

-Relationship between Nature and Culture: In a sense, ecocriticism is a key issue concerning the relationship between culyure and nature. Perhaps the most important point here is that ecocritics reject the notion that everything is social and linguistically constructed the essence of ecocriticism does exist; in our own side rather than waiting to be considered ionized, because it knows that the transformed commas, in any case, are factors that affect us and affect us; may be fatal. In our abuse of its opportunities, naturally, it cannot be reduced to what we consider to be part of our social practice. However, nature and culture are different parts, but they are interdependent and interrelated. According to William Ecocriticism provide critics or race and ethnicity with the view of how those social constructions relate to larger histories of land use and abuse. “As land is traded, people are degraded, moved to and from regions are mere chattel in an invidious property system”(coupe 165). Arnold Toynbee, in his narrative history of the world, entitled Mankind and Mother Earth, published in 1976, concludes that “our present biosphere is the only habitable space we have or are ever likely to have” (Coupe, 225). There is always a possibility of environmental disaster because it is the humankind which makes the biosphere uninhabitable.

- Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary movement committed not to any one methodology but to a particular subject: the subject of how literature and other media express environmental awareness and concern.

-Ecocriticism did not start as a transnational project, but rather as a movement within

U.S. and British literary studies. But since then it has spread worldwide.

- Regarding the politics of ecocriticism itself, most ecocritics think of their ecocritical work as implicitly if not overtly progressive political interventions, although within the movement one finds the same tension as in environmental history between a nature-centric protectionist strain and public health environmentalism concerned especially with such issues as pollution, global warming, and environmental justice. Broadly speaking, the center of ecocritical interest has been shifting from the first emphasis to the second, and as part of this shift one sees a certain amount of “intratribal” criticism of the kind you rightly mention as often coming from outside—namely, contempt for “tree-hugging” images and the like. This internal critique is directed toward the conceptual or theoretical naivete of simplistic versions of “deep ecology” as well as motivated by political commitment.

- “Environmental justice” refers to the problem of (in)equitable distribution of environmental ills and benefits across population groups. In the U. S. this has been associated especially with “environmental racism”—targeting minority communities as sites of hazardous waste facilities and other bearers of toxification. Outside the U. S., and also to a certain degree within, the question has been raised as to whether the key factor in producing environmental injustice is poverty rather than race. Both seem very important to me, and I am not sure whether it is possible (or fruitful) to insist on one alternative rather than the other—even though in the U. S. and many other countries there is a suspiciously high correlation between racial or ethnic minority status and social immiseration of every kind. But to move more closely to the subject of (literary) discourse, environmental justice revisionism tends to focus on urban rather than rural or backcountry settings, in minority and other subaltern voices, and in discourse of the past half-century or so rather than earlier eras—although it can legitimately claim antecedence back to at least the start of the industrial era.

- LB: Ecocritical practice at the level of eco theory and discourse analysis is obviously not the same thing as activism. On the other hand, I believe (and have heard this credibly affirmed by others) that its (re)readings of world literature from the standpoint of attention to environmental emplacement and environmental concern can have a public consciousness-raising effect, and all the more so when one considers the combined impact of scholarship, non specialist writing, public lecturing, and pedagogy in which most serious practicing ecocritics engage. Furthermore, engagement in such work is likely to reinforce for the ecocritic as well as some of his or her hearers, the motivation to engage in on-the-ground activist work. All that having been said, I am inclined to fall back on a haunting line in a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nor knowest thou what argument thy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent.” To measure the social impact of any intellectual intervention is tricky if not impossible. Here one can only hope.

- 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

- 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. It is a broad genre that is known by many names like green cultural studies, eco-poetics and environmental literary criticism, which are some popular names forthis relatively new branch of literary criticism.

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- Ecocriticism is by nature interdisciplinary, invoking knowledge of environmental

studies, the natural sciences, and cultural and social studies, all of which play a part in answering the questions it poses.

- Ecocriticism has emerged as a field of literary study that addresses how humans relate to non- human nature or the environment in literature. Today, with the development and expansion of ecocritical studies, any line between human and non- human nature has necessarily blurred. So when subjected to Ecocriticism, literature of all periods and places—not only ecocentric or environmental literature or nature writing, but all literature is viewed in terms of place, setting, and environment.

- Ecocriticism regards nature as an autonomous, active entity of its own and so can be used as an important tool in interpreting literary texts that represent the relationship of human beings to their natural environment. As man moved from science to modern technology nature became the “Other”. All that is not man came to be called as nature.

- Nature has always proved to be stronger than human. It has often shown its power by controlling manpower through natural calamities like famine, drought, flood, earthquake etc. Human’s life and nature are so interlinked that it is not possible for human beings to separate themselves from its influence. Therefore they have no choice but to accept both nature’s bounty and adversity. This can be said to be reciprocal as nature too is the recipient of human’s action. Our irresponsible actions cause irreparable damages to nature. This is how the chain of ecosystem works in which everything is related to each other and therefore affects each other.

- Cheryll Glotfelty, who is one of the pioneer ecocritics in the English profession and one of the founders of ecocriticism, makes one of the most valuable defi nitions of ecocriticism in her introduction to the co-edited work The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. She notes that “ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (Glotfelty, 1996: xviii). Thus, she tries to link literature and the physical world, or, in other words, she tries to improve the relationship between literature and nature. She argues that people do not have to treat literature and nature as independent with no effect on each other. On the contrary, literature and nature affect each other. The acceptance of this mutual influence of literature and nature is one of the basic and exclusive features of ecocriticism.

- Donald Worster: “We are facing a global crisis, not because of how ecosystems

function but rather because of how our ethical systems function. Getting

through the crisis requires understanding our impact on nature as precisely as

possible, but even more, it requires understanding those ethical systems and

using that understanding to reform them. Historians, along with literary

scholars, anthropologists, and philosophers cannot do the reforming, of

course, but they can help with the understanding.”

- Nature not just as the stage upon which the human story is acted out, but as an actor in the drama.