Ecocriticism And Environmental Criticism In Literature

Ecocriticism: a Survey
Abstract
Ecocriticism is a literary critical branch emerging in the late 1970s attempted to explore the relationship between literature and environment. It attempts to reread major canonical literature by applying ecocentric and ecosystem related concepts to the same. The basic approach is to try to read literary works from the perspective of nature. It analyses human culture by positing it in comparison to the history of the natural world. The ecocritics are enthusiastically concerned over certain issues, such as: the role of the physical setting of a literary work; the metaphor of land or place; the connection between ecosystem and ecological literature. They prioritize the British Romantics and the American Transcendentalists.

Yet we are hardly serious in perceiving the irreversible and impending doom to be brought about by a fatal ecological disorder. Apart from occasional buzz, no global and fitting response has emanated to counter the aggravated situation of environmental crisis. Despite our eco-social indifference the problems are many, ever-growing and aporetic: the discourse over the conflicting issues regarding climate change, pollution, global warming, over-population has become stale and exhausted in academia and equally futile and ineffective when it comes to offer any drastic resolution in the public domain. Yet we cannot gainsay that all these are the genuine outcome of man’s ironical tendency to possess and preside over the planet. We have taken so much liberty in ‘depth and destructiveness’ (Clark 1) that to become oblivious of our ‘roots of being in the earth’ (Fromm 35), the ecological balance is dangerously precarious. ‘Everything is connected to everything else’ (Barry Commoner’s phrase qtd. in Glotfelty xix), that is, they exist in ‘interdependence’ (ASLE web); if man inflicts painful alterations in the non-human world nature is sure to retaliate. Richard Llewellyn in How Green Was My Valley (1939) beautifully summarizes the extant of man’s rootedness to

Nature has given man liberal space, man misappropriated it; nature offered livelihood, man reduced it as mere resource; the earth asserted ‘interdependent community’ (Glotfelty xx), man wanted ‘dominion’ (Lynn White Jr’s term, qtd in Clark 1); the result is unbridgeable rupture and fractured bonding. The situation is made further antagonistic by modern science which at the sametime distances man from the outside world and disturbs the ‘pre-existing web of relations’ (143) in nature; Jane Bennet mourns this authoritative stance of human science: “. . . this pre-modern world gave way to forces of scientific and instrumental rationality, secularism, industrialism, and the bureaucratic state – all of which, combined, disenchant the world” (ibid.). But the palpable and dualistic nexus of man with nature has its roots in the very anthropocentric foundation of human civilization. Many critics held that the Bible’s privileging of man and its consequent trivialization of the external world as resources to ‘exploit for his proper ends’ (White Jr. 10) are at the root of all present environmental crisis. Naturally the Euro-centric materialistic world view in its mad pursuit of worldly progress, coupled with the dominant ideology of enlightenment rationalism further marginalized nature, orienting man into