Ecocriticism: Literature goes green

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” – William Wordsworth (Intimations of immortality)

The world of literary theory in the latter part of twentieth century has been marked by the appearance of numerous innovative approaches to reading and studying works, both old and new. One of the most recent critical perspectives to gain substantial interest is called ecocriticism. The term was first used by William Rueckert in his 1978 essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” in reference to the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.

Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Both terms ‘ecocriticism’ and ‘green studies’ are used to denote a critical approach which began in USA in the late 1980s and in UK in the early 1990s. This critical field was earlier known as ‘the study of nature writing’. But it was Cheryll Glotfelty, who initiated this critical approach as a lasting movement. In 1992, Glotfelty and Harold Fromm co-founded the association for the study of literature and environment. This organization has its own journal called ISLE (Inter disciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment).

The movement in America took its inspiration from three major nineteenth-century transcendentalists, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. They wrote about nature life force and the wilderness. Emerson’s long essay ‘Nature’ was first published in 1836. In this essay, he talks about the impact of the natural world on him. Fuller’s first book was ‘Summer on the Lakes (1843) is a powerful narrative of her encounter with the American Landscape. Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ is an account of his two year stay in a hut he had built on the shore of Walden pound. It is the classic account of his attempt to renew the self through ‘return to nature’. These three books can be treated as the foundational works of American ‘eco-centred’ writing.

The UK version of ecocriticism is better known as Green Studies, takes its inspiration from the romantic movement of late eighteenth century. However, its founding figure is the critic Jonathan Bate, the author of 'Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991). Raymond Williams' book  'The Country and the City' (1973) is also taken by some as articulating ecological concerns, the term 'ecocriticism' had not come into existence by that time. 

Laurence Coupe's essay entitled "The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to ecocriticism" (2000) is considered as a seminal work in the study of ecocriticism. 

Some of the debates within ecocriticism concern the crucial relationship between Nature and Culture. Ecocriticism rejects the major poststructuralist notion that everything is socially or linguistically constructed. As far as an ecocritic is concerned, nature exists in reality whether or not it is textualised or part of the social discourse.

Hence, ecocriticism variously referred to as ecological, environmental or green criticism it can be summed up as follows.

• It does not accept the social or linguistic constructedness of the world. The natural world exists in its own right and beings other than human have a will of their own.
• It is a reading of a literary text which incorporates environmental concerns and issues. The ecocritics, in their attempt to bring environmental issues into focus, by re-reading major literary works and pay special attention to the representation of nature. In doing so, they go by concepts like growth, energy, balance and symbiosis (interaction between two different organisms).
• The ecocritics also wish to find out what role has the physical- geographical setting played in the structure of a poem or a novel.
• The ecocritics discuss factual details impacting environment like entropy or loss of energy on the one hand and sustainable sources of energy on the other.
• They have tried to create a separate canon highlighting authors who foreground nature in their subject matter. Some of these writers are the English Romantic poets and the American Transcendentalists.
• Finally, the ecocritics explore the link between academic and actual practices on the issues of nature.

Ecocriticism is a critical mode that looks at the representation of nature and landscape in cultural texts, paying particular attention to the attitudes towards ‘nature’ and the rhetoric employed when speaking about it. It aligns itself with ecological activism and social theory.

Finally, ecocriticism can be concluded as the study of literature and environment from interdisciplinary point of view. At the same time, it may be pointed out that there is no single figure in the area of ecocriticism who can be considered as a dominant authority like freud in psychological criticism. Here, the disciplines join together to analyse the environment and find out solutions for the contemporary environmental situation such as global warming, etc. In comparison with other ‘political’ forms of criticism, there has relatively been little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism and its scope has broadened rapidly. As such, ‘nature writing’ or writing with consciousness nature is emerging as a distinct and substantial genre and ecocriticism has already made its place as a literary theory.