TOPIC

ECO-CRITICISM• Name:- Sejal Chauhan• Paper:- 7 – Literary Theory & Criticism• Roll No:- 28• M.A. Part-1 Sem-2• Year:- 2013-15• Submitted to:- Smt. S.B.Gardi

Department of English M.K.Bhavnagar University.

What is Eco-Criticism ?

• Eco-Criticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.

• Just 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, eco-criticism takes an earth centered approach to literary studies.

Pollution and Apocalypse

Ex- Silent Spring by

Rachel Carson

Pastoral and WildernessEx- Heart of

DarknessBy

Joseph Conrad

Dwelling and The Earth

Ex- Dwelling Places by

Vinita Hampt

Animals and Plants(flora and

fauna)Ex- Robinson

Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Ecocritics ask questions like:

(1)How is nature

represented in this

sonnet?

(2) What role does the physical

setting play in the plot of this novel?

(3) Are the values

expressed in this play consistent with ecological

wisdom?

(4) How do our metaphors of

the land influence the

way we treat it?

(5) How can we characterize

nature writing as a genre?

In addition to race , class, and gender,

should place become a new

critical category?

Do men write about nature

differently than women do?

In what ways has literary itself

affected humankind’s

relationship to the natural world?

How has the concept of wilderness

changed overtime?

InterconnectionNatureCulture

Share

Human culture

connected

Physical world

Affected it & affected

by it Ecological

Criticism

(1) How Women are represented in

literature.

(2) The important function of

consciousness raising as it rediscovers,

reissues and reconsiders literature

by Women.

(1) How nature is represented in

literature.

(2) Eco criticism reconsiders neglected

genre of nature writing.

(3) Questions about the symbolic

construction of gender and sexuality within literary discourse.

(3) Eco critics includes examining the

symbolic construction of species. How has

literary discourse defined the human?

Feminism and Eco criticism

• We know that we are facing a global crisis today, not because of how eco systems function but rather because of how our ethical system function.

• It requires understanding those ethical systems and using that understanding to reform them.

• Gerard Manley Hopkins: “What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wildeness yet.”

Examples

• James Thomson’s The Seasons and in the widely practiced genre called nature writing.

• Gilbert White’s Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.

• Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.• Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring ,concerning the

devastation inflicted by newly developed chemical pesticides on wildlife, both on land and in water.

Examples Joni Adamson’s ,• American Indian Literature• Environmental Justice• Ecocriticism: The Middle Place. Donelle N. Dreese’s• Ecocriticism: Creating Self and Place in Environmental• American Indian Literature

Some books that were important in the founding and development of ecocriticism.

• Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964)

• Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind• Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological

Ideas (1977)• John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of

Nature (1985)• Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization

(1992)• Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination• Thoreau’s , Nature Writing, and the Formation of American

Culture (1995).

conclusion

• Eco critics encourage others to think seriously about the relationship of humans to nature, about the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas posed by the environmental crisis and about how language and literature transmit values with profound ecological implications.

Thank you