Ecocriticism - concept and critical view

Ecocriticism - concept and critical view

Introduction

Criticism

Criticism is also known as or famous as a Literary Criticism. This tern is generally attached with the study of any literary piece. It is a theory which evaluates the any form which is in written form. This tern is for studies with defining, classifying, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating.

Example: -       If we take a piece of any written form, our great epic “RAMAYAN”. Then let’s
see how Criticism functions.

                        The cannon of the evaluation must be there in Criticism with the use of that cannon we can define. First we have to classify that in which form it is written, for example whether it is in Poetic form of narrative form or in any other for. We have to define its form. The classification of the epic would be just like that is it a religious, social, political???  Then the branch of criticism analyzes and gives interpretation of it. The cannon of criticism interpreting and evaluate it.

Eco-criticism

   

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism in 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism. His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.”

  

Eco criticism is defined by Cheryll Glotfelty as: - 

Eco criticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment

"Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment….takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.

            We can also know this theory as a Green Studies.  It is one of the most recent interdisciplinary fields to have emerged in literary and cultural studies. Eco criticism reflects the role of natural environment which we can see in imagination. It is also gives the concept of “nature” can be related in the life of “human being”. How life of human being is reflected with nature. How both are interwoven with each other. “Life without nature and life without literature is almost impossible.”  So life is reflection of nature and nature gives life to live. So Nature and Culture are related with each other.  So Eco-criticism is study of relationship between literature and physical environment. Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation.

More specifically, it investigates how nature is used literally or metaphorically in certain literary or aesthetic genres and tropes, and what assumptions about nature underlie genres that may not address this topic directly. This analysis in turn allows ecocriticism to assess how certain historically conditioned concepts of nature and the natural, and particularly literary and artistic constructions of it, have come to shape current perceptions of the environment. In this branch of criticism - Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of languages and literature. Most of literary works gives introduction of nature and Literature. As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the non-human. Eco criticism is differentiated from literature, as a different term with the gradual development of branch of criticism.

            Ecocriticism is separate branch of criticism. Other branch of criticism evaluates the relations between writers, texts, and the world. In most literary theory "the world" is synonymous with society-the social sphere. If we agree with Barry Commoner's first law of ecology, "Everything is connected to everything else," we must conclude that literature does not float above the material world in some aesthetic ether, but, rather, plays a part in an immensely complex global system, in which energy, matter, and ideas interact."Eco critics examine human perception of wilderness, and how it has changed throughout history and whether or not current environmental issues are accurately represented or even mentioned in popular culture and modern literature. Ecocritics checks  such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely, is meant by the word nature, and whether the examination of "place" should be a distinctive category, much like class, gender or race.

As Michael P. Cohen has observed, “if you want to be an Ecocritics, be prepared to explain what you do and be criticized, if not satirized.” Certainly, Cohen adds his voice to such critique, noting that one of the problems of ecocriticism has been what he calls its “praise-song school” of criticism.

Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of eco theory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the ecological/environmental side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastorals, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies etc. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature in 1973, The Country and the City, which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre and its habit of making the work of rural labor disappear even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.

Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy; that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature and elevation of the former to moral predominance. Such 'anthropocentrism' is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethnology, Meeker asserts, shows that a "comic mode" of muddling through and "making love not war" has superior ecological value. In the later, "second wave" ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an eco philosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams’ ideological and historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.

In the mid 1980s, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocriticism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function. In 1990, at the University of Nevada in Reno, Glotfelty became the first person to hold an academic position as a professor of Literature and the Environment, and UNR has retained the position it established at that time as the intellectual home of ecocriticism even as ASLE has burgeoned into an organization with thousands of members in the US alone. From the late 1990s, new branches of ASLE and affiliated organizations were started in the UK, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand, India, Taiwan, Canada and Europe.

 What is the main function of Eco critics?

             

Ecocriticism looks back on a long tradition of criticism that approaches nature as an aesthetic and not a scientific object, and that often sees scientific analysis as detrimental to aesthetic appreciation. Indeed, literature and art, in this framework, easily come to be perceived as bulwarks against science and technology (a view that goes back at least as far as the Romantic era) rather than as sites of encounter between different types of knowledge and discourse. Even where science is not rejected, it frequently functions simply as a means of reconfirming the beauty and complexity that the author already assumes to be inherent in nature, without any real conceptual bridging between scientific description and aesthetic valuation. Ecocriticism looks back on a long tradition of criticism that approaches nature as an aesthetic and not a scientific object, and that often sees scientific analysis as detrimental to aesthetic appreciation. Indeed, literature and art, in this framework, easily come to be perceived as bulwarks against science and technology (a view that goes back at least as far as the Romantic era) rather than as sites of encounter between different types of knowledge and discourse. Even where science is not rejected, it frequently functions simply as a means of reconfirming the beauty and complexity that the author already assumes to be inherent in nature, without any real conceptual bridging between scientific description and aesthetic valuation.

A different kind of problem for the construction of eco-bridges between literature and science is pointed up by the shift in terminology from "nature" to the "environment." "Environment" is a more abstract and also a vaguer concept than "nature," since it can (and sometimes does) encompass both natural and man-made habitats. This change in terminology is indicative of strong doubts, particularly--though not only--in the Humanities, about where one should draw the line between nature and culture: although we all have an intuitive grasp of this distinction, it is not at all easy to formalize. Most of the natural environments Westerners encounters in their own societies, at any rate, are anything but "wild" or untouched by man--even though they may continue to strike the observer as irreducibly nonhuman and other. Since the advent of deconstruction,

New Historicism and Cultural Studies, literary critics are justifiably wary of drawing precise boundaries between such concepts as "nature" and "culture" that seem to exclude each other but turn out upon closer analysis to be entangled with each other in multiple ways, whether these entanglements be semantic, historical, or power political.

Green literary criticism, therefore, is confronted from the start with a spectrum of different and not always compatible approaches to the environment: the "discursive construction," which foregrounds the extent to which the very distinction of nature and culture is itself dependent on specific cultural values; the "aesthetic construction," which places value on nature for its beauty, complexity, or wildness; the "political construction," which emphasizes the power interests that inform any valuation or devaluation of nature; and, finally, the "scientific construction," which aims at the description of the functioning of natural systems. Any specific ecocritical analysis has to situate itself in relation to these various discourses and to critically interrogate their contribution to ecological projects. One of the central questions that necessarily emerges in such an interrogation is the question of how the value of the natural environment can and should be assessed in relation to human needs and goals. "Social ecology" generally insists that it is ultimately human needs and societal well-being which must determine our approach to nature, whereas "deep ecology" emphasizes on the contrary that nature has value in and of itself, independently of its functions for human society (this opposition has been discussed by Michael Bennett in American Book Review's recent Urban Culture issue). The goals and methods of an ecocritical project will be crucially determined by how it defines itself in relation to these broader divisions within environmental thought. In a time of intensifying ecological crises and increasing social conflict over the management and distribution of natural resources, as well as a growing number of engagements with environmental issues in literature and other art forms, literary criticism is only beginning to think through the implications of "green thought" for its own practices. Science, in one form or another, has formed a central part of ecological debates to date, and green criticism risks condemning itself to irrelevance if it ignores the contributions as well as the challenges that the scientific description of nature holds out to aesthetic articulations. With a scientifically informed foregrounding of green issues in literature, ecocriticism is likely not only to contribute significantly to the interdisciplinary dialogue between literature and science, but also to the broad rethinking of the relations between humans and nature that is currently taking place in Western societies.

Let’s see some examples of Eco criticism: -

v   In 1915 the aging Thomas Hardy overwhelmed by a sense of the collapse of civilized values as the great war dragged on, wrote a brief poem called in time of ‘’The Breaking Of Nations’’

1.

Only a man harrowing clods

                      In a slow silent walks

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

     Half a sleep as they stalk.

2.

Only thin smoke without flame from the heaps of couch-grass

    Yet this will go onward the same though Dynasties pass.

3.

Yonder a main and her Wight come whispering by: war’s annals will cloud into night ere their story die.

                                                           

Let’s take a familiar example from our epic and mythology that how Criticism use the textual content of any literary piece of art, then the Eco criticism can apply on that particular  work. After evaluating by Eco criticism the result came in different way.

                        We know Ramayana as a epic of Indian mythology. Here description of writer is available. We generally read it as a holy book. But we can also apply ecocriticism here. Let’s see how?? It was clear that “Ramayana” has story of one prince who fought against monster and bring his wife back to his kingdom. But here from the perspective of eco – criticism we can see. In the forest they lived happily. During their residential time, one day Sita saw a “GOLDEN DEER” – she asked for that golden deer. And Rama went on haunt Golden Deer. Now the branch of eco – criticism works.

Ø  What was the description of golden Deer?

Ø  How it was looking like?

Ø  What kind of other animals were there?

Ø  How the Nature described and what was was the effect on that animal?

Ø  Remove history and see How Nature narrated in Piece of Literary work.

 if we look at the example of below poem, easily find that the branch of Eco-criticism has a center of theme of Physical environmental element. 

 केदार नाथ सिंह की एक बेहतरीन कविता- “विद्रोह”

आज घर में घुसा तो वहां अजब दृश्य था सुनिये- मेरे बिस्तर ने कहा

यह रहा मेरा इस्तीफ़ा मैं अपने कपास के भीतर वापस जाना चाहता हूं |

उधर कुर्सी और मेज़ का एक संयुक्त मोर्चा था दोनों तड़पकर बोले

जी- अब बहुत हो चुका आपको सहते-सहते हमें बेतरह याद आ रहे हैं

हमारे पेड़ और उनके भीतर का वह ज़िंदा द्रव जिसकी हत्या कर दी है आपने |

उधर आलमारी में बंद किताबें चिल्ला रही थीं खोल दो-हमें खोल दो हम जाना चाहती हैं अपने बांस के जंगल और मिलना चाहती हैं अपने बिच्छुओं के डंक और सांपों के चुंबन से |

पर सबसे अधिक नाराज़ थी वह शॉल जिसे अभी कुछ दिन पहले कुल्लू से ख़रीद लाया था बोली- साहब! आप तो बड़े साहब निकले मेरा दुम्बा भेड़ा मुझे कब से पुकार रहा है और आप हैं कि अपनी देह की क़ैद में लपेटे हुए हैं मुझे |

उधर टी.वी. और फोन का बुरा हाल था ज़ोर-ज़ोर से कुछ कह रहे थे वे पर उनकी भाषा मेरी समझ से परे थी -कि तभी नल से टपकता पानी तड़पा- अब तो हद हो गई साहब! अगर सुन सकें तो सुन लीजिए इन बूंदों की आवाज़- कि अब हम यानी आपके सारे के सारे क़ैदी आदमी की जेल से मुक्त होना चाहते हैं |

अब जा कहां रहे हैं- मेरा दरवाज़ा कड़का जब मैं बाहर निकल रहा था |

So, Green Studies or eco-criticism is paying attention on nature, animal, human being and about to Nature. It is different from other branch of literary criticism. It is not highlight the Diction of literary work. Language complexity, rhyme scheme, forms of narration. So we can say that ecocriticism gives the concept of “nature” can be related in the life of “human being”.