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TCG's
ECO-ANIMAL/ ECOCRITICISM
Page |
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(photo credit: Dr. Joseph R. Spies, Ceaseless Explorer ) | |
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Ecocriticism (n.): "the dialogic intersection of nature, culture,
and literature" --TCG
(Addendum: This "intersection" includes a thoughtful critique of "ecology" and the environmental movement per se. But "stage one"--the call to an "ecological consciousness"--remains the order of the day.) Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. --Zenrin poem |
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social ecology: Murray Bookchin, 1962
deep ecology: Arne Naess, 1972
ecosophy: Arne Naess, 1972
ecofeminism (écoféminisme): Françoise D'Eaubonne, 1972
literary ecology: Joseph W. Meeker, 1972
speciesism: Richard D. Ryder, 1975(?) (popularized by Peter Singer)
bioregion(alism): Raymond Dasmann & Peter Berg, 1977(?)
ecocriticism: William Rueckert, 1978
ecopsychology: Theodore Roszak, 1992
ecological (literary) criticism: Cheryll (Burgess) Glotfelty, 1989; Karl Kroeber, 1994
[UPDATED OUTLINE--for my 2006 LitCrit/Theory class:] ECOCRITICISM Background–"Schools" of ECOLOGY, etc. | |
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Social Ecology | [neo-Marxist]: capitalism's mistreatment of the working class/poor ≈ exploitation of the environment [Murray Bookchin, 1962] |
Deep Ecology | [vs. "shallow ecology," mainstream environmentalism]: radical (eco-) or bio-egalitarianism (also: ecocentrism); anti-anthropocentrism (aka homocentrism) [Arne Naess, 1972; D. E. also a major influence on the development of the next two:] |
Ecofeminism | –patriarchal oppression of women ≈ exploitation of the environment [Françoise D'Eaubonne, 1972; e.g., Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land (1975) and Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature (1978)] |
Spiritual Ecology | –intuitive/"feeling"/"spiritual"-based relationship with the land and other species, often based upon New Age beliefs (such as Lovelock's "Gaia") and/or Native American tribal wisdom [e.g., Linda Hogan] |
Ecopsychology | –the relationship of human consciousness to the environment (vs. ego-psychology) [e.g., Scott Slovic] |
Environmental Justice | –colonialist oppression of the indigenous/3rd world ≈ exploitation of the environment [e.g., Joni Adamson] |
[Animal Rights?!] | –e.g., Peter Singer (speciesism [Animal Liberation, 1975]), Thomas Regan |
Literary criticism per se | ECOCRITICISM [coined by William Rueckert, 1978]; ≈ literary ecology [Joseph Meeker, 1972]; ≈ ecological literary criticism [e.g., Cheryll Glotfelty, 1989; Karl Kroeber, 1994]; ≈ environmental criticism [Lawrence Buell, 2005] . . . also: ecopoetics |
Introduction to Ecocriticism (ASLE)
Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice
--1994 Western Literature Association Meeting (ASLE)
Ecology Hall of Fame (Ecotopia)
Ecological Philosophy (erraticimpact.com)
Ecofeminist Philosophy (erraticimpact.com)
ECO BOOKS: The Environmental Bookstore
ECO BOOKS on Ecological Literature and Criticism
The Environmental Mailing List Archives (earthsystems.org)
The Social Ecology Project (Bookchin, et al.)
The Institute for Deep Ecology
Green Psychology/Ecopsychology/Ecological Worldview (greenearth.org)
Romantic Circles: Green Romanticism on the Web
The Greening of Women's Studies: Bibliographies and Other Resources
Earth First! The Radical Environmental Journal
Black Rose Books by Subject: Ecology
"Chickadee Alert!!"
(Alaska Biological Science Center)
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I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken nature's holy union, An' justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor, earth-born companion 'An fellow mortal! --from "To a Mouse" |
Botanical lust revealed! Read about Clandestine Marriages and Feminine Males! See the Linnaean system set to heroic couplets! Wonder at how each plant inspires Darwin into lengthy, irrelevant Homeric-simile asides! |
Journals/letters on the fauna and flora of White's home locale, for which he is the "perfect spy"! Noteworthy are White's comments on the rampant animal cruelty and superstitions of the time, although he shoots more than a few specimens himself, for research, and is bent on proving that swallows and swifts hibernate. |
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Little Fly
Thy summers play, My thoughtless hand Has brush'd away. Am not I
For I dance
If thought is life
Then am I
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Aside from the "quaint" woodcut illustrations, some of Bewick's textual anthropomorphisms are also precious: hawks and owls are armed for "rapine and destruction"; magpies are "addicted" to "stealing and hoarding"; and a flock of jays sounds like a "distant meeting of disorderly drunken persons." (All that this really tells us is that Bewick's England had lots of human violence, thievery, and drunkenness?!) As for the skylark, although Bewick includes footnotes regarding the _taste_ of several species, he finds it "not a little reproachful to humanity[!]" that these songsters are still being slain by the thousands for food: indeed, "the prodigious numbers that are frequently caught are truly astonishing." . . . A few scans of Bewick's bird etchings can be seen on my Wordsworth's Birds page. |
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Restrain that rage for power, that bids a Man,
Himself a worm, desire unbounded rule O'er beings like himself: Teach the hard hearts Of rulers, that the poorest hind, who dies For their unrighteous quarrels, in thy [God's] sight, Is equal to the imperious Lord, that leads His disciplin'd destroyers to the field.-- --from The Emigrants (2.424-430) |
TCG's Wordsworth Page TCG's Wordsworth's Birds |
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[--Swan Mother & Cygnets--]
She in a mother's care, her beauty's pride
Long may ye roam these hermit waves. . . .
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Dorothy's domestic-chore tedium is broken up by many "Walks" out of doors, and descriptions & reflections that support her self-proclaimed identity as a "real lover of Nature"; highlights include two touching pairs of lovers: the barn swallows outside her window, and occasional moments of her and her "Darling" brother side by side, "deep in Silence and Love," much as Dorothy imagines "her" favorite swallow pair to be. |
Clare's obsession with detailed descriptions of eggs and nests in his many bird poems may not always result in "aesthetic" success, but the combination of naturalist interests with a poetic soul may be unparalleled to this day. And while his related obsession with the security of a mother bed's nest begs for a psychoanalytical treatment, Clare's transcendence of the species, as it were, is, at times, nothing short of amazing (as is his outrage against rampant tree-chopping): |
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I feel at times a love and joy
For every weed and every thing A feeling kindred from a boy A feeling brought with every spring --from "The Flitting" * * * * * * * * Change cheats the landscape every day No tree no bough about it grows That from the hatchet can repose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spring comes and goes and comes again And all is nakedness and fen --from "The Fens" |
See Darwin get seasick! See Darwin embarrass himself with a bola! See Darwin cringe at the sight of those dang "disgusting" vultures! (And cringe yourself when good Charles considers the natives so much "like animals" that they apparently qualify as subjects of "natural history" themselves!) |
After so much evidence for evolution, it's a strange conclusion, this: "[N]o one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain that whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them." Hmmm: this sounds like a disingenuous bone tossed to his Victorian audience still in the ideological clutches of the Great Chain of Being, since these three essays' actual evidence (especially the comparison of human & gorilla skulls) is a pretty much a subversion of such a "gulf." |
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O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew-- Hack and rack the growing green! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her. . . . --from "Binsey Poplars" * * * * * * * * What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. --from "Inversnaid" |
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Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living--a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate--"nature," as people used to call it--as one thing, and mankind as another? It was natural for people thinking in this way, that they should try to make "nature" their slave, since they thought "nature" was something outside them. |
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I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
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--Marx + ecology = "social ecology" |
--the original ecofeminist manifesto |
The mini-essays on taxonomy, famous ornithologists, etc., are worth the price of admission themselves. |
Get back--to the Pleistocene! Witness a psychoanalysis of humankind via Pooh Bear and Smokey the Bear! Seriously, a great study of how humans' co-evolution with other species has fashioned our language, culture, and psyche. |
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When there have been a few more accidents at nuclear power stations, when there
are no more rain forests, and when every wilderness has been ravaged for its
mineral resources, then let us say "There is no nature."
* * * * * * * * [Regarding Wordsworth's concluding sonnet on the River Duddon, Bate laments:] but now it is not only water that glides inexorably into the sea off Wordsworth's coast. [And, as for Wordsworth's "There was a Boy" (and opposed to the deconstructive readings thereof):] [L]et us not forget that it is also about a boy alone by a lake at dusk blowing mimic hootings to unseen owls. Which are there to answer him. |
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If like Thoreau one imagines animals as neighbors; if like Muir or traditional Native
Americans one imagines life-forms as plant people, sun youths, or grandmother spiders,
then the killing of flies becomes as objectionable as the killing of humans.
* * * * * * * * Who is more likely to treat other people like machines, a person who has trained herself to feel that plants and animals are fellow beings or a person who looks at them as convenient resources? |
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[Though tongue-in-cheek (in its original context), Howarth's description of today's
"ecocritic" is still one of the best I've come across. Such a scholar is . . .]
"a person who judges the merits and faults of writings that depict the
effects of culture upon nature, with a view towards celebrating nature, berating
its despoilers, and reversing the harm through political action."
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[--my text file of intriguing quotations from DESERT SOLITAIRE, organized under "thematic" headings--] |
Great collection of "animal/nature" poems (despite Bly's Jungian spin), from the German Romantics (in translation) to Snyder, Levertov, et al. |
Encounter dang near every "rationalist" and "poetic" argument for and against animal rights still worthy of consideration, in the guise of a rather postmodernist fictional tale. (So don't expect any ready answers from the author, despite his general sympathies.) |
In Sand County Almanac, a game manager turns poet and witty aphorist: follow the stories the rings of an oak, of black-capped chickadee #65290, and of "atom X" on its biotic journey to the sea; be inducted into the "land ethic," an "extension of the social conscience from people to land." |
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The USA slowly lost its mandate
in the middle and later twentieth century it never gave the mountains and rivers, trees and animals, a vote. --from "Tomorrow's Song" (Turtle Island) * * * * * * * * Behind is a forest that goes to the Arctic And a desert that still belongs to the Piute And here we must draw Our line. --from "Front Lines" (Turtle Island) |
Almanac of the Dead: Main characters in Silko's revolution include the Spirit Macaws and the Great Stone Snake; occasional digs at Deep Ecology are also provocative. |
Vizenor's redefinition of/distinction between the "authentic" metaphor and "inauthentic" simile may be one of the best avenues for an ecocritical approach to alter-speciality in literature. (Cool, too, is his reading of Momaday as a veritable "bear"!) |
An unforgettably haunting parable of species exploitation, with a hell of a surprise ending. |
Seems quaint now, perhaps, but it was a shock for this boy when he first saw such an imaginative portayal of Darwinianism at work on the big screen. |
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History shows again and again
How Nature points out the folly of man . . . Godzilla! |
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You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals
So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel |
--and not to forget my favorite early-childhood . . .
Brought to you by . . . | |
E | qual |
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R | ights for |
O | ther |
S | pecies |
©TCG |
--MORE STUFF--
TCG's Literary Criticism & Theory Page
(TCG's) Bird Links ("cobweb" stuff)
:
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/tgannon/ecocrit.html First Created: 1/14/00 Last Revised: 4/17/07 |
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