o What is Eco-Criticism? – Find out how the English Department is advancing this critical new field
So what does a class on literary criticism have to do with Aldo Leopold, energy conservation, or green building? A lot. Lynn Keller’s class is one example of a growing number of courses that explore the relationships between literature and the physical environment and that engages with the scholarship of a fairly new critical discipline, commonly referred to as "ecocriticism."
The study of literature and the environment has been around in one form
or another since the beginning of literary studies, but only recently has the
field begun to fully take shape. Although several pioneering studies in the 1950s and 1960s
established a foundation for the field, the publication in 1996 of two landmark
books, The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, and Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination,
transformed it from a loosely connected collection of scholars into a coherent
and organized discipline within literary studies.
So what exactly is ecocriticism? As Glotfelty and Fromm explain in their introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, it is most generally the study of the relationships between literature and the physical world. "Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender-conscious perspective," they write, "and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies." Ecocritics ask questions like: How is nature represented in this sonnet? In what ways has literature itself affected humankind’s relationship to the natural world? Do men write about nature differently than women do? More recently, ecocritics have turned to related disciplines such as history, art, and philosophy for cross-fertilization, and they consider ecocritical questions from such diverse perspectives as postcolonial theory, evolutionary biology, feminist study, critical race theory, and even cybernetics. Truly, the list of questions about and approaches to the study of literature and the environment are as embracing as they are exciting.