NEW TRENDS IN LITERARY CRITICISM

• Ecocriticism• Afrofuturism or The Black Sci-fi and,

• Cognitive Poetics

Ecocriticism -Ecocriticism is a term coined by William Rueckert in a 1978 essay entitled " Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism."

-Such criticism focuses on writings about the natural world. The ecocritic asserts that the natural environment is a central subject matter for humanistic concern.

Why ecocriticism?

•Ecocriticism emerged out of the growing problems related to the environment such as pollution, the rapidly need for energy.... It is a serious attempt to represent how man and environment affect each other. • Part of ecocriticism is what is called ecofeminism which means the impact of natural environment on women. Ecofeminists draw a comparison between the violence committed against the Earth and the oppression practised against women in the course of history.

•Thomas Hardy is concerned in his novels with such kind of ecocriticism, for his female characters are victims of the physical nature. Nature has many elements that exert much influence on characters.

Afrofuturism or the Black Sci-fi

-The issue of Afrofuturism started when W.E. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk (1903). In it, Du Bois formulated his prophetic vision of the future of the blacks and this vision finds best expression in his far-sighted statement that the problem of the twentieth century is color line.

-Afrofuturism is a term which was first used by the cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993.

-It is an emergent literary and cultural trend in black culture and literature. It is the black science fiction which explores the history of black people to create a utopian vision of the future.  

-Afrofuturists seek to inspire and forge a stronger self-identity and respect for humanity by encouraging black people to reexamine their environments and reimagine the future.

Octavia Butler’s Kindred as An Afrofuturist Novel

OCTAVIA BUTLER

-Kindred (1979), a novel that combines elements of science fiction, fantasy, and the more traditional slave narrative form.-The novel is the first-person account of young African woman writer, Dana, who finds herself shuttled between her California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. There she meets her ancestors: a spoiled, self-destructive white slave owner and the proud black freewoman he has forced into slavery. -  The novel explores the intersection of power, gender, and race issues and speculates on the issue of future equality.

Cognitive Poetics

-Cognitive poetics is a school of literary criticism that applies the principles of cognitive science, particularly cognitive psychology, to the interpretation of literary texts. It is closely connected with reader-response theory and stylistics.- One of the main focal points of cognitive literary analysis is conceptual metaphor, an idea pioneered and popularized by the works of George Lakoff. Cognitive poetics examines how the conceptual bases of such metaphors interact with the text as a whole.

-Cognitive poetics “engages in close analysis of the text, but it recognizes that context has an important role to play in the creation of meaning’’. Seen in this way, it has something to do with New Criticism.

-Reuven Tsur is the originator of the term ‘cognitive poetics.’ He started explaining religious texts from a cognitive poetic perspective.- Although Tsur's original, "precise and particular" sense of the term poetics was related to his theory of “poetry and reception", it has come to be "more broadly applied" to any "theory" or "system" of the works of literature .

-His books include Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance – An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics (Peter Lang,1998), Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (North Holland, 1992).

A final word. Although these trends have some roots in the antiquity, they affirm the idea of cultural continuity, to use T S Eliot’s words. Also, they display the interdisciplinary nature of literature, and how literature can embrace different fields of knowledge.

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