Ecocriticism in a nutshell

October 10, 2021
• Literary Theory, Environmentalism

Ever since Svante Arrhenius’ first prediction of global warming in 1896¹, the effects of climate change have only been getting more apparent. In a world where entire habitats are being lost, creatures are going extinct, natural resources are being depleted, and a layer of concrete covers the planet, it becomes everyone’s responsibility to recognize nature in their own spheres and use that understanding to help protect the planet. Ecocriticism, at its root, is the literary and cultural sphere’s response to the changing world; a movement that started broadly with Buell’s “The Environmental Imagination”² and Glotfelty & Fromm’s “The Ecocriticism Reader”³. This literary movement rode on the shoulders of calls for environmental action in the 1960s that were driven further by Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking “Silent Spring”⁴ which brought to light the devastating ecological effects of DDT⁵.

Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment”³. If someone is confused on reading this definition as to what literature has to do with nature, to them, I implore: Look again at the books you read and ask yourself if the text is bereft of the natural world around it and if not, how is it presented? Is nature just the stage, or is it a character, an active agent that changes the way you visualize the story? An ecocritical analysis of a text focuses on the latter. It takes an “earth-centered approach to literary studies”³ and attempts to connect human and non-human—culture to nature and vice versa. Take, for example, Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”⁶, one of the many classics where nature, here in the form of the whale, becomes a central character that has a personality and actively drives the narrative. But, Buell notes that while Melville develops on the theme of “human ferocity against animal nature”², his interest in whales took the background to his interest in the material aspects and social/cosmic symbolism of whaling, thus somewhat subverting the ecological narrative.

    However, if one were to ask how literary ecological analysis or ecocritical writing is in any way ‘useful to the society’, I would quote Buell once again and reply: “Although the creative and critical arts may seem remote from the arenas of scientific investigation and public policy, clearly they are exercising, however unconsciously, an influence upon the emerging culture of environmental concern, just as they have played a part in shaping as well as merely expressing every other aspect of human culture.”² Ecocriticism does not exist in an intellectual vacuum; it is a transdisciplinary approach that integrates the ecological and social sciences in the context of literature and anthropology and transcends traditional boundaries of disciplines, making it all the more valuable to get a whole, nuanced, multifaceted perspective of the natural world and its connection to human existence. This holistic perspective can be directly used to guide social or political action to bring about change that leads to sustainable consumption and the conservation of the natural world. 

    Much like Feminism, Ecocritical thought too is considered to have gone through three “waves”.⁷ The first wave focused on celebrating nature through literature, while the second wave built a broader perspective by theorizing nature in relation to social and cultural categories, but it stuck to the more Anglo-American perspective⁷. Lastly, the third wave of Ecocriticism attempts to combine theories from the previous waves and expand them to a more global perspective that incorporates the diverse cultural experiences of nature worldwide⁷. For example, consider an ecocritical analysis of Amitav Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide”⁸, which reveals how the colonial past of India interacts with questions of caste, ecological conservation, and human livelihood in the Sundarbans. 

In this story, Ghosh discusses a relatively unknown massacre of Dalit refugees in Morichjhapi at the hands of the government in the name of conservation methods designed based on western principles and develops a powerful portrayal of man-animal conflicts that exist despite government intervention. With this, Ghosh helps us recognize that we are complicit in these ecological interventions that are in no way sustainable and foster only tensions between humans and nature, forcing us to realize the need for a change. Even going back to the era of the romantics, poets like William Wordsworth⁹ and Robert Frost¹⁰ have beseeched us to take a step back and look at the natural world around us. Their calls to recognize our connection and dependence on nature now seem like a premonition of the grim future lying ahead of us. It is now up to us to recognize and utilize every tool we have in the fight against climate change, and ecocriticism can be a powerful torch that can guide us through the darkness to a new sunrise in a world where we give nature the respect it deserves.

References:

1.    Arrhenius, S. & Holden, E. S. ON THE INFLUENCE OF CARBONIC ACID IN THE AIR UPON THE TEMPERATURE OF THE EARTH. Publ. Astron. Soc. Pac. 9, 14–24 (1897).

2.    Buell, L. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. (Harvard University Press, 1995).

3.    Glotfelty, C. & Fromm, H. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. (University of Georgia Press, 1996).

4.    Carson, R. Silent Spring. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002).

5.  Lab, P. W. Ecocriticism // Purdue Writing Lab. Purdue Writing Lab https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/ecocriticism.html.

6.    Melville, H. Moby Dick. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014).

7.    Gladwin, D. Ecocriticism. Lit. Crit. Theory (2017) doi:10.1093/OBO/9780190221911-0014.

8.    Ghosh, A. The hungry tide. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006).

9.    Ramazani, A. & Bazregarzadeh, E. An Ecocritical Reading of William Wordsworth’s Selected Poems. Engl. Lang. Lit. Stud. 4, p1 (2014).

10.  Zapf, H. Robert Frost: An Ecological Perspective. Robert Frost Rev. 69–85 (2004).