1. Literature & Environment
Lecture 2: Theory ecocriticism 1

2. =Overview about “Literary Theory”
-Notion
1. The body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature
2. “Theory” from the Greek “theoria” (contemplation, speculation, a view or perspective of the Greek stage)
3. The underlying principles or the tools or different lenses, by which we attempt to understand literature, art, and even culture
4. Not the meaning of a work of literature but the theories that reveal what literature can mean
5. “Literary theory,” “critical theory,” or “theory,” and now “cultural theory”
-Genealogy
1. Criticism has been around in one form or another since Ancient Greece because we love to tell people what we think of stuff.

3. Structuralism / Semiotics (1920s)
i. Platonic criticism: his views on art expressed in Phaedrus, Ion, and the Republic.
ii. Aristotle’s Poetics
iii. Longinus’s “On the Sublime”
2. Modern literary theory gradually emerges in Europe during the nineteenth century: German "higher criticism" subjected biblical texts to a radical historicizing that broke with traditional scriptural interpretation.
3. Major Types of Literary Theory:
Formalism, New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelian Criticism (1930s)
Psychoanalytic Criticism, Jungian Criticism (1930s)
Marxist Criticism (1930s)
Reader-Response Criticism (1960s)
Structuralism / Semiotics (1920s)
Post-Structuralism / Deconstruction (1966)
New Historicism / Cultural Studies (1980s)
Post-Colonial Criticism (1990s)

4. Feminist Criticism (1960s)
Gender / Queer Studies (1970s)
Critical Race Theory (1970s)
-Functions
1. It provides a framework or perspective through which we are able to analyze a literary work within the framework
2. It enables us deepen or widen our own understanding and heighten our appreciation.
3. It works not on the level of a personal preference, but through an objective process, leading to uniform judgment
4. Not value judgement: though a work is not related with environmentalism, we do not claim that that work is morally wrong or artistically has no value

5. =Notion of Ecocriticism
-Two ideas: eco + criticism
-eco: “not harming the environment” (OED)
-criticism: “the critical assessment of a literary or artistic work” (OED); the scholarly study and interpretation of literature
-ecocriticism: the study of literature with a special attention to the significance of nature in literature.
-Patrick D. Murphy: “literary criticism that arises from and is oriented toward a concern with human and nonhuman interaction and interrelationship.”
-Scott Slovic: “the study of nature writing by way of any scholarly approach or, conversely, the scrutiny of ecological implications and human-nature relationships in any literary text.”

6. =Ecopoetics
-Two key critics: Jonathan Bate and Jonathan Skinner
-They emphasize the root of “eco-” in the Greek word oikos, the home or dwelling place and thus the term “ecopoetics” as a making, through poetry, of the dwelling place or home.
-Johnathan Bate’s Song of the Earth (2000)
1. Bate’s question about poetry: “What are poets for?”: is poetry the authentic representation of reality, or merely the decoration of life? Does it help us to remember our origins?
2. These questions lead him to a new kind of poetics with an ecological doom: ecopoetics, coined by him
3. The Song of the Earth uses the term, ecopoetics, to describe a rather exclusive club of neo-romantic male poets

7. -Ecopoetics is something more than:
1. the making and study of pastoral poetry, or poetry of wilderness
2. poetry that explores humanity’s ethically challenged relation to other animals.
3. poetry that confronts disasters and environmental injustices, including the difficulties and opportunities of urban environments
-Jonathan Skinner as the editor of the influential journal Ecopoetics ( )
1. Rather than a kind of writing, ecopoetic is a form of site: to shift the focus from themes to topoi
i. The English word 'topic' comes from the Greek word topos
ii. The Greek word topos: the place where a person or people live
2. To an array of practices converging on the oikos, the planet earth that is the only home our species currently knows.

8. =Various terms
-Ecology: “the branch of biology concerned with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings” (OED)
-Environmentalism: protecting the earth from human pollution and destruction.
-Ecocriticism (US, celebration of nature) & Green studies (UK, the threats or dangers of nature)
-Ecological Footprint (cf. carbon footprint): the world’s premier measure of humanity’s demand on nature
-Sustainable development: a pattern of resource use that aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but in the indefinite future.
-Green Living / Going Green: To be environmentally sound or beneficial; Preservation of resources and offering environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional methods or products

10. =Genealogy of Ecocriticism
-Embryonic writings in relation to the emergence of ecocriticism in the 20th Century
1. ‘Enclosures: the ecological significance of a poem by John Clare’ (1963, Robert Waller, US)
2. ‘The ecological vision of Gary Snyder’ (1970, Thomas Lyon, US)
3. ‘Home at Grasmere: Ecological Holiness’ (1974, Karl Kroeber, UK)
-Establishment of ecocriticism
1. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991, Jonathan Bate, UK)
2. The Ecocriticism Reader (1996, Ed. By Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, US)
3. The Environmental Imagination (1996, Lawrence Buell, US)
-Eco-critics’s claim on Romanticism as the origin of ecocriticism: William Wordsworth and John Clare

11. -From the Ancient Civilizations
1. The Epic of Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia)
2. The Old Testament (Judeo-Christianity)
3. The metaphysical thinking of the Ancient Greek
=Main issues
-Notion of nature
1. Raymond Williams: nature may well be the most complex word in the English language
2. Nature: “the phenomena of (1) the physical world collectively, including (2) plants, animals, and the landscape, as (3) opposed to humans or human creations” (OED)
3. Environment: “the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates” (OED)
4. A natural environment and a social environment