CONFLICT BETWEEN EURO-AMERICAN AND NATIVE AMERICAN ATTITUDES TOWARDS NATURE: AN ECOCRITICAL STUDY OF TRACKS AND LOVE MEDICINE BY LOUISE ERDRICH (original) (raw)

Nature in the Realm of Indigenous Writing: An Ecocritical Perspective

Ars Artium, Vol. 7, 2019

This paper is a study of the Indigenous literatures of Australia and Canada. As Indigenous writings reflect the symbiosis of nature and culture, an important aspect of Indigenous people is that they try to return to nature to receive Indigenous spirituality that has its roots in harmony among all beings. These writings based on nature-centred thoughts, belief system, traditional patterns, spirituality and cultural practices, environmental knowledge and respect, change and catastrophe, and dependence on nature and natural resources have been studied as presented in some relevant texts.

Unfurling western notions of nature and Amerindian alternatives

This essay presents an overview of the concept of ‘nature’. It provides some reflec- tions on the heterogeneity of notions and values subsumed in the term nature in a portion of the Western tradition (from Ancient Greece-Rome through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment to the present day). The paper explores, in a diachronic, non-comprehensive fashion, the various connotations and conceptions given to the term nature, highlighting the socio-ecological risks that occur when ecological notions are extrapolated worldwide as if they were standard ones. It also reveals that such philosophical plurality is a historical as well as a contemporary phenomenon. The heterogeneity of notions in Western and Amerindian traditions should, ideally, be linked to pragmatic strategies geared toward the construction of improved contemporary environmental ethics.

Nature, Culture and Literature: An Ecocritical Contestation

The Creative Launcher

Literary theory, in general, examines the relations between writers, texts and the world. In most literary theory, "the world" is synonymous with society-the social sphere. The two most influential schools of thought that brought about great remarkable changes in people’s perspectives and life in the twentieth century—Marxism and psychoanalysis have the common assumption that what we call ‘nature’ exists primarily as a sign within the cultural discourse. Apart from it, nature has no being and meaning, they claim (Coupe 2). This vision of nature as a cultural construct permeates various schools of thoughts like formalists, new historicist, and deconstruction - all of which repudiate the existence of nature outside the cultural discourse, and take is just as a sign. However, nature affects us in several different ways, and always remains influential in human life; it cannot, therefore, be dismissed merely as a linguistic construct, and from ecological point of view it will b...

Eco-Criticism and Nature Writing .the Trails of the American Approaches

European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research, 2014

Ecocritical attention has primarily focused on nineteenth– and twentieth-century British and American texts, predominantly non-fiction nature writing, and also nature-conscious fiction and poetry. The paper attempts to shed light to a series of puzzling but response-inciting questions regarding the American gendered approaches to nature, and the niche that Ecocriticism occupies in mainstream American Literature. The study is conceived as a merging of theoretical arguments and textual study. The theoretical part attempts to shed light on such issues as: Ecocritical traits and approaches; European vs. American approaches to nature; and Nature and Women's writing .The focus of the textual study are 10 American Nature Writing non-fiction classics and illustrated considerations of the main topics handled in these works. The study seeks to show that though ecocriticism is attempting to break new trails by going through the untrammeled nature-centered works, humans are failing to go wi...

Call for Articles - Avenging Nature: A Survey of the Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature

At the dawn of 'ecocriticism' as a discipline of study within the Humanities, Glotfelty and Fromm (1996), in the first general reader in the matter, defined it as the critical practice that examines the relationship between literary and cultural studies and the natural world. In general terms, during the past two decades, ecocriticism has denounced the anthropocentric and instrumental appropriation of nature that has for so long legitimized human exploitation of the nonhuman world. Exposing the logic of domination that articulates the very power relationships that both connect and separate human culture and natural life, recent trends in ecocriticism have raised awareness of the 'otherisation' of nature (Huggan and Tiffin, 2015), pointing out the need of assessing insurgent discourses that—converging with counter-discourses of race, gender or class— realize the empowerment of nature from its subaltern position. But such empowerment of nature first requires that the sundering of human and nonhuman realms is overcome since, as Kate Rigby explains, only by regaining " a sense of the inextricability of nature and culture, physis and techne, earth and artifact—consumption and destruction—would be to move beyond (…) the arrogance of humanism " (2002, p. 152). Yet, recognizing such inextricable relationship between human and natural while overcoming the arrogance of anthropocentrism entails the ecocritical admission that all cultural discourses are in fact exploitative of nature. Rigby states it clearly while explaining, " culture constructs the prism through which we know nature " (p. 154). We comprehend nature when we apprehend the world through language and representation, but nature precedes and exceeds words; it is therefore " real " (1992, p. 32) and separated by an abyss from the symbolic networks of culture that write, master, assign a meaning to and attempt to set nature in order. From this perspective, culture is not exactly the end of nature as much as it is an appropriation and colonization of nature. Culture masters, dominates and instrumentalizes the natural world. However, in a time when the " end of nature " that Bill McKibben prophesized in 1989 has been certified, when we know for a fact that it is indeed a different Earth we are living in—because by changing the climate there is not a corner of the planet that has not been affected by our actions—the evidence of global ecological endangerment compels the ecocritical debate to install environmental ethics and concerns at the crux of humanistic research. The critical enterprise is far from easy though. The argument that cultural representations of nature establish a relationship of domination and exploitation of human discourse over nonhuman reality is extendible to the critical task. As humanist critics, our regard of nature in literary and artistic representation is instrumental and anthropocentric. But the time has come to