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Ecocriticism: A Definition and a Way of Reading
“Simply put, ecocriticism 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, ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.” Cheryl Gotfelty
I want to speak for the wilderness idea as something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people….Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed….—Wallace Stegner
Underlying the beauty of the spectacle there is meaning and significance. It is the elusiveness of that meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural world where the key to the riddle is hidden.—Rachel Carson
Example. Carson investigated a problem in ecology and in doing this worked with scientists (biologists, toxicologists), but Silent Spring finally undertook a cultural, not scientific, purpose when it made claims about what should NOT happen in our world. This cultural critique was a moral one.
When we label something an ecological problem, we have made some claim about what we wish the world would be like. Certainly, while our claims grow out of scientists’ claims, they are not defined by scientists.
John Passmore has argued the following important distinction: Problems in ecology are scientific and to be solved by the formulation and testing of hypotheses in ecological experiments. Ecological problems are qualities of our culture—arising because of how we deal with nature—and are characteristics from which we would like to be liberated; we do not consider these characteristics to be good.
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Ecocriticism: A Definition and a Way of Reading
I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular….but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive—Anne Dillard
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.--Darwin