Environmental Discourse: Spatiality, Power and Non-Human Concerns in Monique Roffey's The White Woman on the Green Bicycle and Sun Dog (original) (raw)
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Since prehistory, literature and the arts have been drawn to portrayals of physical environments and human-environment interactions. The modern environmentalist movement as it emerged first in the late nineteenth century and, in its more recent incarnation, in the 1960s, gave rise to a rich array of fictional and nonfictional writings concerned with humans’ changing relationship to the natural world. Only since the early 1990s, however, has the long-standing interest of literature studies in these matters generated the initiative most commonly known as “ecocriticism,” an eclectic and loosely coordinated movement whose contributions thus far have been most visible within its home discipline of literature but whose interests and alliances extend across various art forms and media. In such areas as the study of narrative and image, ecocriticism converges with its sister disciplines in the humanities: environmental anthropology, environmental history, and environmental philosophy. In the first two sections, we begin with a brief overview of the nature, significance, and evolution of literature-environment studies. We then summarize in more detail six specific centers of interest: (a) the imagination of place and place-attachment, (b) the enlistment and critique of models of scientific inquiry in the study of literature and the arts, (c) the examination of the significance of gender difference and environmental representation, (d ) the cross-pollination of ecocritical and postcolonial scholarship as ecocriticism has extended its horizons beyond its original focus on Anglo-American imagination, (e) ecocriticism’s evolving interest in indigenous art and thought, and ( f ) ecocriticism’s no less keen and complex attentiveness to artistic representation and the ethics of relations between humans and animals.
Ecopoetic Encounters: Amnesia and Nostalgia in Alexis Wright's Environmental Fiction
2015
In Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), Alexis Wright establishes an allegorical mode where she reimagines Europeans' first encounters with Australia from an Aboriginal environmental perspective. In this narrative system, the discovery of Australia is not realised by exploring colonisers, but by vulnerable strangers who apprehend the continent both experientially and linguistically. In Carpentaria, the Stranger-figure of Elias Smith is left amnesic after surviving a shipwreck during a cyclone; his first encounter with Australia is extremely violent and results in a loss of personal (hi)story. In The Swan Book, the character of Bella Donna seeks refuge in the nostalgia of swan stories after the disappearance of her native lands due to climate change; her first encounter with Australia is characterised by slow violence and results in a profusion of stories. In this essay I argue that by drawing attention to the interweaving of language and experience and by dramatising the relationship between organism and environment, ‘ecopoetic encounters’ allows readers to rediscover major episodes of Australian environmental history. Indeed, through the experiential and poetic meetings of Stranger-figures with Australia, Wright does not depict the initial moment of discovery as a nation-building event; rather she re-narrates it as a counterdiscursive episode of environmental historical rediscovery. Journeys of migration, environment transformations, and the marginalisation of populations are translated in an Aboriginal allegorical mode that allows European readers, through self-reflexivity, to rediscover the Australian continent through the perceptions, actions and emotions of Stranger-figures.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH AND INNOVATION IN SOCIAL SCIENCE (IJRISS) , 2023
This research examines Claude McKay De Lisser's novel Jane's Career and selected poems by Derek Walcott in the context of Caribbean cultural history, contemporary situations, and environmental contexts using ecocritical methods. This study investigates the effects of the second wave of ecocritics, who expanded the definition of "environment" to encompass urban landscapes, drawing inspiration from Caribbean peoples' deep connection to their surroundings. This study uses ecocriticism to examine how humans and nature influence the urban environment, including built and undeveloped spaces. Human culture is contextualised within the urban natural environment to examine characters' environmental views and behaviours. This study covers a range of nature attitudes, from exploitative to pro-nature. Ecocriticism clarifies Caribbean literature's complex relationship between nature and culture. This scholarly investigation invites readers to better comprehend and appreciate these literary works by examining their motifs of environmental exploitation and harmonious cohabitation. Thus, this work enriches ecocritical studies by offering new insights into Caribbean literature and ecological challenges.
An Ecocritical Reading of Contemporary British Fiction with Special Reference to
Aesthetique Journal for International Literary Enterprise, 2020
Ecocriticism as a field in literary studies means the examination of the relationship between literary representation of human life and the environment. It focuses on how the surrounding environment shapes and reshapes the narratives of a region and its inhabitants. Human narrative would be inessential without nature and environment serving in the background.