Essay on Eco Criticism

Unit-IV

ECO-CRITICISM

Introduction

Eco criticism" was a term coined in the late 1970s combining "Criticism" with a shortened form of "ecology" the science that investigates the interrelations of all forms of plant and animal life with each other and with their physical habitats.

1. Write an account of ecocriticism and its environmental implications.

1. Introduction

Ecocriticism is literary and cultural criticism from an environmentalist viewpoint. Ecocriticism identifies the critical writings that explore the relations between literature and biological and physical environment, conducted with an acute awareness of the damage being caused on that environment by human activities.

2. Development

In America, an early instance of nature writing was William Bertram's Travels (1791); among its successors was a classic of this genre, Henry David Thoreau's Walden (7854). By the mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau and other writers in America and England were already drawing attention to the threats to the environment by urbanization and industrialization. In the early twentieth century, the warnings by scientists and conservationists increased; two especially influential books were Aldo Leopold's A Sand Country Almanac (1949), drawing attention to the signs of degradation of the environment and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), concerning the devastation inflicted by newly developed chemical pesticides on wildlife, both on land and in water, The first use of the term 'ecocriticism' seems to have been by US Critic William Rueckert in 1978. The first British Critic to use the term tentatively was Jonathan Bate in Romantic Ecology (1991).

3. The concern for the environment

By the later part of the century, there was widespread concern that the earth was in an environmental crisis brought on by the industrial and chemical pollution of the earth, water and air. The depletion of forests and of natural resources, the relentless extinction of plant and animal species, and the explosion of the human population threatened to exceed the capacity of the earth to sustain it. It was in this climate of crisis that ecocriticism was inaugurated. By the 1990s it had become a recognized and rapidly growing field of literary study whose concern with the literature of the environment encompassed all continents.

4. Eco critical writings

Many Eco critical writings continue to be oriented toward heightening their readers' awareness. They even incited them to social and political action. While the other movements in criticism are directed toward achieving social and political justice, a number of ecocriticism and impelled by the conviction that what is at stake in their enterprise, is not only the well-being but, ultimately, the survival of human life. Texts such as Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995), two novels in which the environmental values of Native American Culture is set against those of white industrial capitalism, are an important presence in the new Eco critical canon.

5. The environmental justice movement'

The environmental justice movement is a collective term for the efforts of poor communities to defend themselves against the dumping of toxic waste, the harmful contamination of their air, food, and water, the loss of their lands and livelihoods, and the indifference of government and corporations. Eco critics responsive to environmental justice will bring questions of class, race, gender, and colonialism into the Ecocritical evaluation of texts and ideas. The challenging versions of environmentalism seem exclusively preoccupied with the preservation of wild nature and ignore the aspirations of the poor.

6. Issues on ecocriticism

Jonathan Bates, in Romantic Ecology: Words worth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) sets ecocriticism in opposition to a dominant mode of theory. He calls for a move away from Marxist and New Historicist criticism that can see nothing in nature writing but conservative ideology. Bate's view is that the environmental crisis necessitates cultural and critical realignments. Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests (1922), a study of the meaning of forests in Western culture from antiquity to postmodernity, shows wild nature in a dialectical relationship with civilization. Wild places provide solace for exiles, release for repressed and outlawed feelings. Bate argues the environmental crisis demands a return to a literal reading.

7. Conclusion

Eco critics concur that science-based knowledge of impending ecological disaster is not enough because knowledge can lead to effective political and social action only when informed and impelled, as it is in literature, by Imagination and feeling.