11
toward celebrating nature, berating its despoilers, and reversing their harm through political action.” The Greek oikos, household, and in modern usage refers
both to “the study of biological interrelationships and the flow of energy through organisms and inorganic matter.”
3
So the oikos is nature, a place Edward Hoagland calls “our widest home,” and the kritos is an arbiter of taste who wants
the house kept in good order, no boots or dishes strewn about to ruin the original décor.
4
B. History of Ecocritical Movement
Ecocriticism as a concept first arose in the late 1970s, at meetings of the WLA the Western Literature Association, a body whose field of interest is the
literature of the American West.
5
From the point of view of academics, ecocriticism is dominated by the Association for the Study of Literature and the
Environment ASLE, a professional association that started in America but now has significant branches in the UK and Japan. It organises regular conferences and
publishes a journal that includes literary analysis, creative writing and articles on environmental education and activism. Many early works of ecocriticism were
characterised by an exclusive interest in Romantic poetry, wilderness narrative and nature writing, but in the last few years ASLE has turned towards a more
general cultural ecocriticism, with studies of popular scientific writing, film, TV,
3
Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005 p. 13.
4
Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm 1996, op.cit. p. 69.
5
Peter Barry, Beginning Theory an Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, 2
nd
ed UK: 2002, p.161.
12
art, architecture and other cultural artifacts such as theme parks, zoos and shopping malls.
6
According to a prominent Ecocritic, Lawrance Buell, one can identify several trend-
lines marking an evolution from a “first wave” of ecocriticism to a “second” or newer revisionist wave or waves increasingly evident today.
7
1. First Wave Ecocriticism
For first- wave ecocriticism, “environment” effectively meant “natural
environment.” In practice if not in principle, the realms of the “natural” and the “human” looked more disjunct than they have come to seem for more recent
environmental critics. Ecocriticism was initially understood to be synchronous with the aims of earthcare. Its goal was to contribute to “the struggle to preserve
the „biotic community’”
8
The word environmental is usually understood to mean the surrounding conditions that affect people and other organisms. In a broader definition,
environment is everything that affects an organism during its lifetime. In turn, all organisms including people affect many components in their environment. From a
human perspective, environmental issues involve concerns about science, nature, health, employment, profits, politics, ethics, and economics.
9
First-wave ecocriticism give special canonical emphasis to writers who foreground nature as a major part of their subject matter, such as the American
6
Greg Garrard 2004, p. 4.
7
Lawrence Buell 2005, p. 17.
8
Ibid. p. 21.
9
Eldon D. Enger and Bradley F. Smith, Environmental Science: A Study of Interrelationship, 9
th
ed, USA: McGraw-Hill, 2004, p. 5.
13
transcendentalists, the British Romantics, the poetry of John Clare, the work of Thomas Hardy and the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century.
10
2. Second Waves or Newer Revisionist Waves
Second waves or newer revisionist waves of ecocriticism has closer alliance with environmental science, especially the life sciences. The biological-
environmental-literary connection reached its first major critical expression in 1974 with the publication of Joseph W. Meeker.
11
Glen A. Love in his 1999 essay Ecocriticism and Science: Toward Consilience? points out that a line of biological
thinking has been a constant and indispensable accompaniment to the rise of ecocriticism and the study of literature and the environment. Biologically verified
evidence of environmental destruction and it was the natural connecting point, as the emphasized, which can claim a permanent and important relationship to
human life.
12
Meanwhile, William Howarth seems rather to favor bringing humanities and science together in the context of studying specific landscapes and regions
Howarth 1996, to which end geology is at least as important as the life sciences Howarth 1999. Ursula Heise, on the other hand, has recently turned to a branch
of applied mathematics, risk theory, as a window onto literature’s exploration of
10
Peter Barry 2002, p. 169.
11
New Literary History, Vol. 30, No. 3, Ecocriticism The Johns Hopkin University Press, Summer, 1999, p. 564.
12
Ibid. p. 565.
14
the kind of contemporary anxieties.
13
Then, others have also taken up the argument that ecocriticism’s progress becoming more science-literate.
Likewise, the Carson’s book Silent spring is a great model. Carson had to
investigate a problem in ecology, with the help of wildlife biologists and environmental toxicologists, in order to show that DDT was present in the
environment in amounts toxic to wildlife, but Silent Spring undertook cultural not scientific work when it strove to argue the moral case that it ought not to be. The
great achievement of the book was to turn a scientific problem in ecology into a widely perceived ecological problem that was then contested politically, legally
and in the media and popular culture. Thus ecocriticism cannot contribute much to debates about problems in ecology, but it can help to define, explore and even
resolve ecological problems in this wider sense.
14
Science’s “facts” are “neither real nor fabricated”: the microbial revolution hinged on a certain kind of orchestrated laboratory performance, without which
science history would have taken a different path, but the discoveryinvention was not fictitious, either. Bruno Latour ingeniously proposes the neologism “factish”
a collage of “fact” and “fetish” to describe this understanding of the “facts” of science: “types of action that do not fall into the comminatory choice between fact
and belief ” Latour 1999: 295, 306.
15
The discourses of science and literature, then, must be read both with and against each other.
According to the former way of thinking, the prototypical human figure is a solitary human and the experience in question activates a primordial link
13
Lawrence Buell 2005, p. 18.
14
Greg Garrard 2004, p. 6.
15
Lawrence Buell 2005, op.cit. p. 21.
15
between human and nonhuman. According to the latter, the prototypical human figure is defined by social category and
the “environment” is artificially constructed. In both instances the understanding of personhood is defined for
better or for worse by environmental entanglement.
16
C. Ecocriticism as Literary Criticism
