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Ecological literary criticism is a new interdisciplinary and cross-cultural literary criticism theory.Since the second half of the twentieth century, mankind has faced an unprecedented ecological crisis and survival crisis. If the crisis is not effectively contained, human beings as a biological population will likely disappear from the earth in the near future. It is in this case, a new theory of literary criticism: ecocriticism came into being. The main appeal of ecocriticism is to re-examine human culture and reveal the ideological and cultural roots of ecological crisis.
The global ecological crisis we face today is not caused by the ecosystem itself, but by our cultural system. To survive this crisis, we must understand our culture as much as possible to nature. The impact of ecological criticism on the basis of contemporary ecological holism philosophy, from the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives to explore the interrelationship between literature, culture and nature, eloquently reveals that the ecological crisis is essentially a crisis of human culture. Oppose to simply reduce ecological problems into economic or technical issues.
To solve the ecological crisis from the root cause, it is far from enough to rely solely on natural science and technology or economic means. It is necessary to actively participate and guide the humanities and social sciences. To solve the ecological crisis, we must get rid of the anthropocentrism, break the boundaries of traditional disciplines based on dualism and mechanics, and explore countermeasures to solve the ecological crisis from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective.
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Ecocriticism is becoming a global literary phenomenon. analyzes the western ecological criticism research from the aspects of its rise, development, principle, strategy, theoretical construction and its value significance.’ecocriticism’, also known as ‘studies of literature and environment’. It emerged in the United States and Britain in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Rise of Ecological Criticism
‘Ecological criticism’ as a new trend of criticism, its birthplace is the United States. In the middle of the 20th century, the earth’s natural ecology and human spiritual ecology presented a lot of crises, which led to reflection and introspection in the field of western ideological and cultural. Especially since the 1970s, many humanities studies such as history, philosophy, law, sociology, and religion have shown a ‘green’ trend. In the social field, from the 1960s to the 1970s, the environmental protection movement, as a part of the ‘New Social Movements’, swept through Europe and the United States with anti-war movements, civil rights movements, women’s movements, and the mainstream of Western society.
Values and ideology challenge. Before the emergence of the trend of ecocriticism, black literary criticism, feminist criticism, post-colonial criticism, etc. have become hot spots in the literary research field. In contrast, literary scholars’ responses to environmental issues remain relatively calm. Before the 1980s, few literary research journals, professional societies, and conferences were about literature and the environment. In the late 1970s, the references to ‘ecological criticism’, ‘ecological literature research’, and ‘literature ecology’ were only occasionally appeared in several literary studies of British and American scholars, and did not cause repercussions. Until the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, the above situation has caused tremendous pressure on literary scholars who care about environmental issues, and also inspired their sense of mission. Some scholars have invested in this new research direction with an eager and eager attitude. At this time, ecocriticism is quite sudden and embarrassed by a deviant momentum, which is closely related to the emotional factors of its advocates.
From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, it should be regarded as the bud of ecological criticism. At this time, although the academic circles who care about the issue of ‘literature and the environment’ are gradually increasing, their research is mainly aimed at improving the environmental awareness of ordinary reader
Ecocriticism is based on the premise that the Earth’s ecological disaster caused by human behavior is imminent, and it is imperative to solve environmental problems. To solve this problem, literary criticism practice is not a trivial, auxiliary, but crucial task. Under this understanding, in the early 1990s, ecocritic advocates advocated changing the criticism of the “narrow anthropocentrism” that dominated past literary studies and replaced it with “ecological centralism” criticism. This established premise determines the literary studies in the context of ecological criticism and post-modern contexts, which are based on race, class, gender, etc., not only for the purpose of interpreting the world, but also trying to bridge the gap between text and reality, by changing the readers. The way the consciousness and its relationship with the work change the world.
This kind of ‘political attribute’ is more obvious in the early stage of ecocritic development. Many critics at the time had a strong anti-theoretical tendency to oppose the textual theory in contemporary criticism because it rejected any association between the reappearing world and the empirical world. They argue that the core task of ecocriticism is to emphasize that literary studies should seek to return readers to ‘contact’ with nature. In order to accomplish this task, they particularly emphasized the study of ‘natural writing.’ The so-called ‘natural writing’ originally refers to a non-fiction literary genre in the history of American literature, which mainly describes the physical and spiritual experience of human beings in the natural environment.
From a practical point of view, the current ‘ecological criticism’ in the United States and Britain has broken through the limitations of ‘natural writing research.’ In recent years, more and more scholars have joined the ranks of ecocriticism, injecting many new elements into ecocriticism. Many of them borrowed the perspective of ecocriticism to re-examine the literary works and writers they had studied, and broadened the scope of ecocritic texts to extend from the Bible to children’s literature, from indigenous literature to left-wing urban literature. At the same time, as many mainstream literary theories and critical methods are applied to ecocritic research, scholars then think about how to develop this “ecological-centered” criticism between other humanistic, theoretical horizons and other types of critical practice.
More generative relationships. The current ecological criticism can not only use ‘any method’ to study natural writing, but also scrutinize ‘any literary text’, even including texts that seem to describe the unnatural world completely, and interpret the ecological meaning or the relationship between man and nature. . This means that all forms of discourse are in principle sufficient to be the symbol of “environment”; the core task of ecocriticism is not to encourage readers to physically close to the natural environment, but to arouse and enhance the reader’s “environmentality” of human existence. the so-called ‘environmental crisis’ refers not only to the threat to the natural environment, but also to the crisis of the entire civilized world; this crisis is not only related to non-recurring, human-experienced Contact with nature is more about daily human experience.the ultimate goal of ecocriticism is to build a new methodology that analyzes the “naturalness in the text”.
The Theoretical Construction of Ecological Criticism and Related Thinking
Ecocriticism is a kind of cultural criticism, but it surpasses the single perspective of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation compared with other types of cultural criticism. The broad theoretical perspective of ecocriticism requires its integration with other literary theories and the integration of multidisciplinary knowledge. Ecocriticism regards nature as a social and psychological construction. The analysis of the relationship between nature and culture has a strong post-modern criticism; ecocriticism rewrites the history of literature, historically texts, and texts.
The historicalization of criticism is based on the perspective of new historicism and the viewpoint of ‘historical textuality and historical textuality’; ecocriticism often adopts a new critical reading method in text analysis; ecological criticism deconstructs anthropocentrism The strategy, like the contemporary criticism of democratizing white-centred racial revisionism, deconstructing feminist criticism of patriarchalism, and deconstructing Western centralism, is a declaration of war against logocentrism. Moreover, ecocriticism also needs to combine literature with other disciplines, and to interpret it from various disciplines such as ecology, biology, geography, psychology, anthropology, culture, aesthetics, ethics, history, and religion. The model has formed a blend of many new horizons to enrich its critical practice.
Ecocritic has the following basic characteristics
First, ecocriticism focuses on the study of natural ecology and spiritual ecology in literature, and strives to present the complex movements of human and natural world in the works, and to grasp the interaction between literature and the natural environment. The frequency of use of ecocriticism in literary criticism has increased and the scope has been expanding. Therefore, ecocriticism has been accepted as a dictionary of Western literary terminology as an important term of literary theory.
Second, ecocriticism can reinterpret the classics of traditional literature from the perspective of ecological culture, interpret the hidden ecological and cultural significance and ecological aesthetic significance, and re-establish people and self, people and others, people and society, people and nature, The poetic aesthetic relationship between man and the earth.
Third, ecocriticism maintains a ‘political correct’ position on the subjectivity of human beings in artistic creation – neither an anthropocentrism nor an absolute naturalist position, but a harmony between man and nature. Human beings have changed from ‘self-awareness’ to ‘ecological awareness.’ Human beings and the earth are the life-coincidence relationship. Human beings are no longer the masters of nature, but a member of the earth species, living and dying with other members of the natural world.
Fourth, ecocriticism links literary research with life sciences, studies literature and nature from two fields, and focuses on the literary level from the perspective of human social development and ecological environment change, thus making ecocriticism have interdisciplinary characteristics of literature. Ecocriticism is the literary reflection of human beings after the ecological disaster. It is the literary artist’s reorientation of human beings’ position on the earth and the re-liquidation of the modernities of the West by the thinkers.
Situational Review: An Introduction – Suresh Frederick
Situational criticism is currently playing a major role in English literary criticism. This is different from the literary criticism methods that have been talked about before. Since this is only growing, nobody has yet given a definitive definition of this.
The first use of the term ecocriticism was by William Rueckert. He coined the term in his 1978 essay ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism’. But since then none of these have been used. In 1989, at the Coeur d’Alene, the Western Literature Association (WLA) Meeting, Cheryll Glotfelty, a college student at the time, returned to contextual analysis through his article.
Cheryll Glotfelty is currently a professor of literature and the environment at Navada University. He and many other professors have written several research papers using this method of review. Cheryll Glotfelty’s definition of ‘contextual analysis is the study of the relationship between literature and the environment’, although many do not agree with the definition of contextualism.
But some people think that natural is better than environmental. One must recognize the difference between the environment and nature. In many places they are both used as synonyms. But this is not correct. Nature is important in this critical mode. Contextual analysis must therefore demonstrate the relationship between literature and nature.
Environmental review is the study of nature in the literature. It is a natural worldview. Michael P. Branch and some others claim that human beings are trying to maximize humanity by combining them with other human beings and the environment in which they live. There are many such explanations for environmental review.
Next we move on to the critical mode. William Ruckard’s essay ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism’ is featured in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, in which he transforms many theories of biological ecology into literary criticism. ‘How is humans destroying nature?’ Man destroys nature by destroying nature. He says that this wrong attempt by man is an attempt to self-destruct or to attempt suicide. In this world, man and nature coexist, how to collaborate and flourish. We need to find the right solution.
Many ecologists have put forward their theories in ecological vision. We think these are not useful for reading literature, teaching literature, and writing about literature. But Rueckert says all of these are really useful. This is the first theory of ecology he claims. ‘Everything is connected to everything else’ This statement is mind-expanding, rather than mind-bending or mind-blowing or mind-boggling. Most people would not agree with the claim that nature does not belong to man. But now the laws of man must help protect the natural right. William Rookert considers lawyers to fight for them.
Rueckert regards poetry as a stored energy and a living thing. Poetry emerges from language and imagination. This is a renewable source of energy. By reading poetry, by teaching and by critique, the power in it is revealed.
In the next section of his essay, Rookert describes the poets as being equal to the sun, and poems to the green plants.
Rukert states that we are not free to violate the laws of nature. He says that man must suffer the greatest destruction when he violates the law of nature and that the punishment of nature is worse than the punishment of God. Instead of thinking of conquering nature, he suggests that man should live in harmony with nature. This combination is called Symbio.
