Ecocriticism by Greg Garrard (2004)
1. Beginnings: Pollution
- general agreement that modern environmentalism begins with Rachel Carson's "A Fable for Tomorrow" in Silent Spring - a poetic texts that relies on literary genres or pastoral and apocalypse that can be traces back to Genesis and Revelation in the Bible (1-2).
- definitions of ecocriticism:
"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-consciousness 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." (Glotgelty The Ecocriticism Reader 1996, xix)
"The ecocritic wants to track environmental ideas and representations wherever they appear, to see more clearly a debate which seems to be taking place, often part-concealed, in a great many cultural spaces. Most of all, ecocriticism seeks to evaluate texts and ideas in terms of their coherence and usefulness as responses to environmental crisis" (Richard Kerridge Writing the Environment 1998, 5)
- early work focused on Romantic poetry, wilderness narrative and nature writing > in the past few years, ASLE has turned toward a more general cultural ecocriticism (studies of popular scientific writing, film, TV, art, architecture, theme parks, zoos, shopping malls). (4).
- John Passmore proposes distinction between "problems in ecology" (scientific issues) and "ecological problems" ("features of our society, arising out of our dealings with nature, from which we should like to free ourselves, and which we do not regard as inevitable consequences of what is good in that society") (cites Passmore 1974, 44).
- "One 'ecocritical' way of reading is to see contributions to environmental debate as examples of rhetoric" (6) - Ralph Lutts's argument that Silent Spring drives home impact of chemical pollution by an underlying analogy to the pollution of radioactive fallout
- "Another crucial feature of rhetoric is that tropes are assumed to take part in wider social struggles between gender, classes and ethnic groups. Cultures are not shaped equally by all their participants, nor are the many world cultures equally powerful, and we must remain aware that even tropes that might potentially confront or subvert environmentally damaging practices may be appropriated" - eg. wilderness as 'natural home' for SUVs (9)
- "structuralism and poststructuralism have emphasized the linguistic function of signs that relate to one another rather than refer to real things" while postcolonial and feminist literary theory have demonstrated how categories presumed to be real or natural are cultural constructions. (9) > ecocriticism has to maintain a balance between awareness of the ways in which 'nature' is culturally constructed and awareness of "the fact that nature really exists, both the object and, albeit distantly, the origin of our discourse" (10).
- Garrard prefers 'shaping' 'elaboration' or 'inflection' to construction, which seems to suggest "the autonomous work of minds and hands" (10)
- as science has become able to detect smaller and smaller levels of chemical pollutants, pollution has become divorced from sensory perception. Types and sources of pollution have also proliferated, so that we can now think of artificial light in terms of pollution or of carbon dioxide as a pollutant even though it occurs naturally in large quantities - "This generalisation and, from an ordinary sensory perspective, dematerialisation of pollution has significant ramifications in our culture, constituting a 'world risk society' of impalpable, ubiquitous material threats that are often in practice indissociable from their cultural elaborations" (12).
2. Positions
e