Ecocriticism

In questo saggio si svolgerà una comparazione dei tre brevi romanzi di Calvino La formica argentina (1952), La nuvola di smog (1958), La speculazione edilizia (1957), con le opere di Malerba in cui maggiormente emerge il suo impegno ecologico: Il serpente (1966), Salto mortale (1968) e Fantasmi romani (2006). Tra questi romanzi che trattano con nerbo la tematica etico-ambientale, esiste un dialogo molto forte a livello testuale e ideologico, certamente maturato dall'amicizia e dagli scambi tra i due autori. Malerba e Calvino, uomini di città cresciuti però in stretto rapporto con la campagna, si rivelano attenti osservatori dei mutamenti economici, antropologici e ambientali che l'Italia subiva nell'epoca del boom. Lontana da qualsiasi lirismo romantico e da sentimenti nostalgici per un mitico passato, la relazione tra letteratura e ambiente affiora nei testi come una forma di denuncia ecologica contro inquinamento, speculazione edilizia e sottomissione degli organismi non-umani. Sia Malerba sia Calvino si fanno portavoce della necessità di smascherare le ideologie dominanti e boicottare le logiche binarie come natura / cultura. Nella battaglia che inscenano tra umano e non-umano emerge la loro prospettiva " ecocentrica " che attribuisce un valore intrinseco ad ogni organismo vivente e al loro spazio naturale a prescindere dalla loro utilità e profitto per l'essere umano. Abstract This essay compares Italo Calvino's short novels La Formica Argentina (1952), La Nuvola di Smog (1958), and La Speculazione Edilizia (1957), with Luigi Malerba's works, in which his strong environmental consciousness most comes to light: Il Serpente (1966), Salto Mortale (1968) and Fantasmi Romani (2006). These works engage in a textual and ideological " ecocentric " dialogue about the environment and society, which was certainly the result of the close friendship and professional exchanges between the two authors. This project thus participates in ecocriticism through an investigation of the textual and ideological dialogue between these texts. Rather than merely romantic lyricism and feelings of nostalgia for the mythical past, the relationship between literature and the environment emerges in the texts as a form of ecological denunciation against pollution, building development, and the subjugation of non-human organisms. Malerba and Calvino, city men who spent their upbringing in close contact with nature, reveal themselves to be attentive observers of the economical, anthropological, and environmental changes that Italy underwent in the period known as the economic boom. Both Malerba and Calvino bring to the fore the urgency to unmask dominant ideologies and to boycott perceived binary oppositions of nature versus culture. Through these texts, they stage a battle between the human and non-human, bringing together their " ecocentric " perspective with their goal of bestowing an intrinsic value to every living organism and their natural space.

Birds featured in many aspects of medieval people's lives, not least in their poetry. But despite their familiar presence in literary culture, it is still often assumed that these representations have little to do with the real natural world. By attending to the ways in which birds were actually observed and experienced, this book aims to offer new perspectives on how and why they were meaningful in five major poems -- The Seafarer, the Exeter Book Riddles, The Owl and the Nightingale, The Parliament of Fowls and Confessio Amantis. In a consideration of sources from Isidore of Seville and Anglo-Saxon place-names to animal-sound word lists and Bartholomew the Englishman, the author shows how ornithological truth and knowledge are integral to our understandings of his chosen poems. Birds, he argues, are relevant to the medieval mind because their unique properties align them with important religious and secular themes: seabirds that inspire the forlorn Anglo-Saxon pilgrim; unnamed species that confound riddling taxonomies; a belligerent owl who speaks out against unflattering literary portraits. In these poems, human actions and perceptions are deeply affected by the remarkable flights and voices of birds.

This book sets forth a new research agenda for climate theory and aesthetics for the age of the Anthropocene. It explores the challenge of representing and conceptualizing climate in the era of climate change.　

In the Anthropocene when geologic conditions and processes are primarily shaped by human activity, climate indicates not only atmospheric forces but the gamut of human activity that shape these forces. It includes the fuels we use, the lifestyles we cultivate, the industrial infrastructures and supply chains we build, and together these point to the possible futures we may encounter. This book demonstrates how every weather event constitutes the climatic forces that are as much social, cultural, and economic as they are environmental, natural, and physical. By foregrounding this fundamental insight, it intervenes in the well-established political and scientific discourses of climate change by identifying and exploring emergent aesthetic practices and the conceptual project of mediating the various forces embedded in climate.　

This book is the first to sustain a theoretical and analytical engagement with the category of realism in the context of anthropogenic climate change, to capture climate’s capacity to express embedded histories, and to map the formal strategies of representation that have turned climate into cultural content.

Part 1. The Climate of Representation

1. Ecological Postures for a Climate Realism

Amanda Boetzkes

2. Anthropocene Arts: Apocalyptic Realism and the Post-Oil Imaginary in the Niger Delta

Philip Aghoghovwia

3. Fire, Water, Moon: Supplemental Seasons in a Time without Season

Anne-Lise François

Part 2. The Subject of Climate

4. Indigenous Realism and Climate Change

Kyle Powys Whyte

5. Realism’s Phantom Subjects

M. Ty

6. Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time

Kathryn Yusoff

Part 3. Realism and the Critique of Climate, or Climate and the Critique of Realism

7. The Poetics of Geopower: Climate Change and the Politics of Representation

Ingrid Diran and Antoine Traisnel

8. Perplexing Realities: Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene

Barbara Herrnstein Smith

Follow this link for free access:
https://ddec1-0-en-ctp.trendmicro.com:443/wis/clicktime/v1/query?url=https%3a%2f%2ffanyv88.com%3a443%2fhttps%2fwww.tandfonline.com%2feprint%2fGQHWFGD829BPB3X5WGP2%2ffull%3ftarget%3d10.1080%2f13629387.2022.2087266&umid=ea5791a6-6ab7-4534-bdbb-3a82405461b6&auth=6b96cc275637658c91fe2f0131f0c7214a2d4396-c60044adf4c8544fa0593cdec629c10e108a89e9

Ecocritique accepts, as it must, that humans and environments have been ripped apart historically, sociologically, and aesthetically. But it also recognizes that because we have become strangers, dialogue between humans and environments is possible as it could not be if we were all one universal flux. Because of our mutual alienation, there are endless opportunities for misunderstanding when we capture, store, and process what we confront as Nature. Contemporary economic and political conditions driving ever more terrifying inequalities of wealth and power create the crisis implicit in ecocritique. The critical functions of art, which in these circumstances implies technical and creative aesthetic and political practice, concern the construction of a “we” that embraces the human and non- human victims of ecocide. The master’s tools might dismantle the master’s house, but can they build a different dwelling? Where are the practices that can produce more-than- human social change?

This thesis analyzes Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing from ecofeminist viewpoints by specifically examining the interconnections between women and nature in both future-societies. Essentially, ecofeminism is a radical literary theory and a political movement based on ecology and a sub-branch of ecocriticism, which proclaims that the subjugation of the females and the exploitation of nature are all interrelated stratums conducted by a prevailing masculine mindset; thus, this radical ecological criticism necessitates the analyses of these interconnected oppressions. According to the ecofeminist understanding, the patriarchy exerts and maintains its power and domination by making use of authoritative power structures that are based on dualisms like human/nature, men/women, nature/culture. Thus, ecofeminists attempt to destroy all the established dualities and they disseminate ecologically informed societies where equality and liberation are maintained for all genders. This study explores the specific ecofeminist themes prevalent within Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing. These novels trace the connections between gender, nature, femininity, masculinity, sexuality, religion and science. While the dystopic fiction of Atwood offers a catastrophic social order that reflects the fallacy of the modern man regarding his oppressive attitude towards nature and women, Starhawk’s ecotopia, on the other hand, proposes an ecotopia where all species, genders, the human and nonhuman communities live in equality, peace and harmony. Both fictions, thus, focus on the issues of women and nature and signal an ecofeminist message by reflecting that if the society does not change its patriarchal, hierarchal and mostly androcentric approach towards women and nature, the environmental crisis and gender-based discrimination will be sustained forever.

2. Dünya Savaşı sonrasında akademik alana hızla yayılan eleştirel düşünce, sosyal bilimler ve kültürel çalışmalar altında pek çok yeni çalışma alanının ortaya çıkmasını sağlamıştır. 1980'li yıllarda yaygın olarak gelişen edebiyat merkezli ekoeleştiri ve yine benzer dönemlerde gelişen eleştirel veya yeni müzikoloji çalışmaları, eleştirel yaklaşımlarıyla mevcut paradigmaları sarsmıştır. Ekoeleştiri düşüncesi ile müzikoloji disiplinini bir araya getiren ekomüzikoloji alanı ise müzik ve kültür arasındaki ilişkiye doğayı da katarak, çevre/doğa konusuna ses ve müzik açısından bakan yeni bir yaklaşım ortaya çıkarmıştır. Disiplinlerarası bir perspektifle çevre/doğa bağlamında birçok konuyla ilgilenen ekomüzikoloji çalışmaları, bilimsel ve aktivist bir çabadır. İnsan-doğa ilişkisini sorgulayan ve günümüzdeki çevre krizleri ile sürdürülebilirlik sorunlarına müzikolojinin sınırlarını genişleterek yanıtlar bulmaya çalışan ekomüzikoloji, 2000'li yıllardan itibaren tüm dünyada hızla gelişen bir alan olmuştur. Bu makalede, ekoeleştirel ve doğakültürel bir müzikoloji yaklaşımı olarak ekomüzikolojinin ortaya çıkışı, bu alanda yapılan çalışmalar ile alanla ilgili kavramsal ve yöntemsel tartışmalar konuyla ilgili temel kaynaklar üzerinden incelenmiştir. Bu makalenin, gelecekte Türkiye'de ekomüzikoloji alanında yapılacak araştırmalara yol gösterici olması hedeflenmiştir.
_______________________________
After World War II, the rapid spread of critical theory led to the emergence of many new fields of study under the social sciences and cultural studies. The literary centered ecocriticism, which was developed in the 1980s, and the critical or new musicology studies that developed in similar periods, influenced the existing paradigms with their critical approaches. The field of ecomusicology, which brings together the idea of ecocriticism with the discipline of musicology, has brought a new approach to the environment/nature issues in terms of sound and music, adding nature to the relationship between music and culture. Ecomusicology studies dealing with many issues in the context of environment/nature from an interdisciplinary perspective is both a scientific and an activist effort. By questioning the human-nature relationship and trying to find answers to today's environmental crises and sustainability problems by expanding the boundaries of musicology, ecomusicology has been a rapidly developing field since the 2000s. In this article, the emergence of ecomusicology as an ecocritical and naturecultural musicology approach, as well as conceptual and methodological discussions concerning this field are examined through the main sources. This article is intended to be a guide to future research in the field of ecomusicology in Turkey.

O presente artigo é uma reflexão sobre a
utilização da Ecocrítica na análise de fontes
impressas sobre preservação ambiental nas
aulas de história. O objetivo é refletir sobre o
Ensino de História como uma ferramenta para a
conscientização sobre a defesa do meio
ambiente, desenvolvendo nos estudantes a
capacidade de compreender e analisar as ideias
ecológicas presentes em seu cotidiano a partir
das reflexões da ecocrítica. Além disso,
abordamos a utilização de fontes impressas
(jornais, revistas), como instrumentos de
construção do conhecimento histórico e da
consciência ambiental. A partir da revista Globo
Rural apontamos uma análise crítica de seu
conteúdo, destacando pressupostos da história
ambiental e da ecocrítica.

What I want to present to you today is an argument for why NATURE, as a concept and term of art, should be retained by contemporary environmental political theory despite some recent claims by theorists like Bruno Latour and environmental historians like William Cronon to the contrary. In other words, what I want to do is offer an argument for what NATURE might continue to offer us as 21 st century participants engaging in the critical task of rethinking the boundaries between nature and politics, the human and nonhuman etc. Or, one last time, what we lose when we jettison NATURE as a concept. To do this I'll turn to the work of St Thomas Aquinas and in particular his account of natural law. And my answer in short—just to preview— is that what we lose when we abandon the concept NATURE is something like the ability to belong to, to establish and work at friendship with—these are Aquinas's words—the more-than-human world we inhabit. And the crucial point I think-and that I hope to make-is that this friendship goes beyond merely acknowledging our interconnectedness and hybridity—as important as that may be—and requires a certain care for and respect for boundaries as anyone who has ever tried to make friends and failed knows.

This paper explores the "contractions" of meteorological and mental disturbances in Jenny Offill's novella "Weather." It is particularly interested in the ways in which the novella uses formal strategies to create the affective experience of uncertainty and, possibly, eco-anxiety.

Anima de Wajdi Mouawad nous offre l'occasion d'explorer la question de savoir ce qui se produit lorsque l'écopoétique s'intéresse à un texte qui n'est pas ostentatoirement environnementaliste. En effet, hormis ses animaux narrateurs, Anima semble être un texte à priori dépourvu de richesse écopoétique évidente. Pourtant, l'étude proposée va permettre de montrer, d'une part, que la sensibilité écopoétique ne se consacre pas uniquement à l'environnement, mais également à la notion plus vaste d'oikos ; d'autre part, que les techniques narratives du roman mettent en place une déconstruction du propre de l'homme.

Brenda Hillman’s 2018 collection, ​Extra Hidden Life Among the Days​, is rich with many
lives—bacterial, human, arboreal, fungal. A multi-media, mycelial entanglement of elegies, personal photographs, and journal meditations, Hillman’s linguistic materials take the viewer from her family’s home in Tucson to the White House Lawn, weaving contemporary political struggles into her own observations of human-nature relationships, as well as the agency of forests and lichen. How might one describe Hillman’s work? To simply call it ‘ecopoetics’ does not do her experimental storytelling justice. Rather, we might better understand Hillman’s reconfiguration of Romantic, timeless environmental writing into a timely, expansive bio-cultural ecology as ‘political-pastoral,’ a type of poetic writing that embraces humanity’s impact on landscapes, that imbues the natural world with political symbolism.

This paper explores interdisciplinary teaching methods that combine studies in the humanities (particularly literature and philosophy) with multisensory environmental experience (outdoor fieldwork and reflection). While various forms of outdoor practice are already familiar in environmental humanities education, I emphasize their role as a powerful tool for examining rationalist traditions that trivialize embodied experience and estrange our intelligence from the intimacies and enigmas of everyday contact with nonhuman nature. Drawing directly from student reflections in environmental humanities courses at the University of Washington Bothell, I illustrate ways that undergraduates apply insights from phenomenology and literary studies to trace connections between ordinary sensory experience, contemporary and historical environmental values, and the literary and philosophical traditions that inform them. Through this integrated approach, students also develop awareness of the ethical implications of sense experiences we share with other forms of life, and draw on their embodied encounters to critique Cartesian legacies that privilege logical abstractions at the expense of other ways of knowing.

I læreplanen for norskfaget integrerer fagfornyelsen bærekraftig utvikling samt demokrati og medborgerskap som tverrfaglige temaer. Denne artikkelen argumenterer for å kombinere arbeidet med begge temaene. Med bakgrunn i miljø- og klimaproblematikken har det blitt utviklet forskjellige modeller av medborgerskap som også omfatter miljørelaterte aspekter. Artikkelen tar utgangspunkt i de tre mest innflytelsesrike av disse modellene: Derek Bells miljømedborgerskap, Andrew Dobsons økologiske medborgerskap og John Barrys bærekraftmedborgerskap. Disse modellenes ulike definisjoner av medborgernes miljørelaterte rettigheter og plikter brukes som teoretisk bakgrunn i en analyse av Arne Svingens barnebok En himmel full av skyer, en roman med en handling som har tydelige paralleller til utviklingen av den globale miljøbevegelsen Fridays For Future. Analysen viser hvordan romanen rommer elementer fra ikke bare én av de nevnte modellene, men kombinerer og estetiserer aspekter fra alle tre. Hovedpersonen gjennomgår en utvikling i sitt miljøengasjement fra å redusere sitt individuelle økologiske fotavtrykk gjennom endret privat forbruk, til et fellesskapelig engasjement i den offentlige sfæren med mål om å endre overordnede strukturer i samfunnet som står i veien for en bærekraftig utvikling. Romanen er derved et godt eksempel på hvordan skjønnlitterære tekster bidrar både til å formidle og forhandle idéer om relasjonen mellom miljø og medborgerskap. Arbeid med slike skjønnlitterære tekster gir mulighet til kritisk refleksjon over denne relasjonen, samt at det kan fremme elevenes handlingskompetanse med tanke på bærekraftig utvikling så vel som demokrati og medborgerskap.

'Country Manifest' is the unpublished dissertation from my PhD in creative writing, 'Nature in the Twenty-First Century', completed at the University of New South Wales in 2016. The creative work, 'Six Capitals', was published in 2014 and 2020. This following is the abstract from the completed PhD.

This thesis is comprised of two parts—a work of nonfiction, Six Capitals, and a scholarly dissertation, Country Manifest—which investigate the vital contemporary relationship between western economics and the natural world. Six Capitals charts the breakdown of economic measures of wealth and conceptions of nature in the face of ecological crises and the advent of the networked computer. It argues that the measures that underpin industrial capitalism and today govern the global economy are inadequate for an age of climate change. This has brought attempts to measure previously unmeasured realms of wealth, figured as ‘capital’, such as ‘natural capital’ and ‘social capital’. Six Capitals argues that this proposed new system of measurement is not enough to address the contemporary crises in nature. Instead, a new corporation and a new conception of nature in western law are required.

Country Manifest examines five novels by Alexis Wright and Kim Scott published after the 1992 Mabo Decision which overturned the legal concept of terra nullius in Australia. The novels are Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997), Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013); and Scott’s Benang: From the heart (1999) and That Deadman Dance (2010). Drawing on ecocriticism, it examines their portrayal of two conflicting conceptions of land: Aboriginal conceptions of land as ‘Country’, a vibrant ecological system with agency to which humans belong; and western constructions of land as inert property owned by humans to be developed for profit. It argues that the novels privilege the former over the latter understanding of land and in so doing rewrite the continent as ‘black land’. Through its focus on ‘black land’ this thesis reintroduces ‘landscape’ to Australian literary criticism and shows it to be of new significance in the twenty-first century, and argues this has implications for a planet faced with climate change and other ecological crises.

Six Capitals and Country Manifest are related by their mutual engagement with questions about the value of the natural world and human conceptions of it. In both economic constructions of nature are shown to be damaging to the natural world and complicit in contemporary ecological crises.

Ecotheology firmly recommends the concept of ‘Kinship’. The theology explains that human and nature are connected in a profound way to the universe having emerged from it. All of life on earth come from the same source and our destinies are intertwined. This interrelatedness with other kinds of life is  accurately described by a familial metaphor kinship. Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves, offers fine grounds to probe into this concept of kinship. As the story unfolds, the compelling circumstances experienced by Julie force her to befriend wolves. The relationship between Julie and the wolves started out as a need for survival. She overcomes her fear and takes refuge with the wolves and invariably becomes one of the wolf pack. She is overwhelmed in the end by the kinship offered by Amaroq – the wolf leader. She discovers the truth that nature is an integral part of the environment and therefore she begins to take care of the wolves and other bird friends as a reciprocation of her understanding of kinship.
Keywords: Ecotheology, kinship, environmental kin, steward, biocentrism.

This paper discusses Finnish poet Pentti Saarikoski's 1983 collection The Dark One’s Dances and argues that the work envisions a more ecological mode of existence for humankind. Through a conscious blurring of subject and object, an employment of shifting perspectives, and a critique of linear time, Saarikoski presents an image of reality in constant flux. This is a new reading of the poet's work, one that builds upon an existing criticism that has traditionally place it in the realm of Modernism and postmodernism. A close reading, informed by ecocritical theory, of several poems from the collection reveals a clear ecological bent to this postmodern fluidity. Central to ecocriticism is the critique of anthropocentrism and of the artificial separation of humankind from the natural world resulting from belief in such a binary opposition. Along these lines, pioneering ecologist Neil Evernden identifies the concept of interrelatedness as the central tenet of ecology; in such a view the discrete self becomes one with the surrounding environment. Saarokoski's poetry is reflective of this dissolution of the self in the way he depicts individuals in his poems fluidly blending into the world around them. In doing so, he also presents an image of what literary critic and ecologist Joseph Meeker terms the comic mode of behavior in which speakers and figures adapt to their reality as opposed to attempting to exert control over it. Finally, Saarikoski's presentation of time as cyclical as opposed to linear is considered with relation to the concepts of fluidity and flux. Taken as a whole, The Dark One's Dances offers an alternative to the anthropocentrism that dominates Western culture.

This article discusses the role that nature plays in ethnic literature and films in the Seventeen-Year Period (1949-66). It takes the story of Daji and Her Fathers as an example and investigates the ways in which nature features in the reconstruction of ethnic identity in the formation of a multiethnic nation as in the case of China. I will explore three aspects: first, the debate on humanism, which was closely related to ethnic minority film production at the time. A central issue of the debate then was the question of "humanistic"-that is, affective, emotional, subjective, and most importantly, natural-expression in literary and art works. Ethnic minority identity, with its unique status, was given some latitude for humanistic expression and "natural" understanding. Second, due to ethnic minority groups' special significance in China's nation-building, a reconstruction of ethnic minority nature became imperative for the People's Republic of China. This reconstruction involves mostly restructuring a "second nature," or dialectic nature of minority under the socialist mandate. This dialectic nature demands something more than natural, immediate constituents and requires a socially and politically mediated ethnic minority nature that is aligned with multiethnic nationality. Third, this dialectic nature is to be formed following Marxist dialectical materialism, mainly through the means of social(ist) labor that changes nature.

This article explores Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros’ collaboration with photographer Adriana Lafer in Arquitetura do silêncio (2015). The meta discourse on language that emerges in the book challenges meaning, reference, and translation as a means to transfigure the modes of seeing the Pantanal biome in Brazil, shifting our focus to the insignificant and abandoned things strewn across the ground. By reading Barros alongside Frege and Quine, this article argues in favour of the profound awareness of language in the Brazilian poet’s work, an awareness that culminates in the blurring of words and images in Arquitetura.

Briar March’s award-winning documentary There Once Was an Island chronicles the lives of the Polynesian inhabitants of Takuu, a small atoll in the Pacific, who are faced with the gradual submersion of their home due to sea level rise.  Applying Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” to the ecological and political processes shown in the film, the chapter argues that March’s documentary is a eco-cosmopolitan project reaching out to new forms of solidarity.