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December 11, 2007
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This special issue of Anglia covers a new direction within Anglo-American literary and cultural studies, which has come to the fore since the 1990s and has been known under the name of Ecocriticism or Literary Ecology. To some extent, this new research paradigm is related to postmodernism, but at the same time its assumptions are at odds with some long-cherished premises of postmodern theory. By entering a dialogue with ecology, literary studies deliberately turn their attention to the relationship of literature to nature and of the text to the extratextual world, which had been largely neglected or merely considered from an ideological aspect in recent cultural studies. To reflect on culture's relationship to nature was considered politically questionable and epistemologically naive in the pansemiotic universe of poststructuralism in which every apparent reference to nature was deciphered as a linguistic-cultural construct that served only to hide the sociopolitical interests and ideologies from which it originated. Yet while it is true that in the course of history, nature has frequently been misused as an ideological instrument and a vehicle of power and manipulation – such as for the justification of supposedly ‘natural’ hierarchies of gender, class, race, ethnicity and so forth – this makes it all the more necessary to explore, in appropriately informed and complex ways, the significance and possible meanings of the concept of ‘nature’ within the spheres of culture. It is the aim of ecologically inspired literary and cultural studies, as they are demonstrated in the essays of the present special issue, to focus on the interaction and interrelatedness of culture and nature without neglecting the inescapable linguistic and discursive mediatedness of that interrelationship.
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December 11, 2007
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This essay considers the impact of evolutionary biology on the concept of pastoral and surveys selected literary works from ancient to modern, to indicate the long history of anxiety about the relation of humans to other animals. Ecocriticism has been closely associated with literary pastoral since its beginnings but has come under criticism for this focus in the past few years. The pastoral has traditionally concerned itself with peaceful green spaces of natural purity where harassed urban dwellers retreat to restore themselves, but critics have exposed naiveté, escapism, and privilege at the heart of this literary mode. Such a dualistic, anthropocentric attitude toward the natural world is disastrously inaccurate in terms of evolutionary biology's demonstration of human enmeshment within the whole community of life on the planet. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of brute Being, embracing the philosophical implications of evolution, offers theoretical grounding for ecocritical analysis of literature that is congruent with the findings of evolutionary biology, ethology, and other life sciences.
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December 11, 2007
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The following essay takes issue with the absence of landscape from so much of 20 th -century American Studies literary scholarship. It argues that this conceptual blank results from landscape's perception as a celebratory, culturally conservative category. With this essay, I intend to counter these apprehensions and discuss how the formation of “social and subjective identities” (Mitchell) through processes of landscaping is ushered by, if not predicated on imagined, fictionalized landscapes. Based on a critical revision of Leo Marx's concept of the middle landscape, the essay outlines landscape's conceptual history and discusses its implication in the modern discourse on nature. This will include remarks on landscape in literature, referencing authors such as Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Willa Cather, and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. In conclusion, the essay will present some comments on the significance of literary and cultural theories of landscape for larger public debates about the reconstruction and reorganization of space in the 21 st century.
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December 11, 2007
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The article examines the representation of nature in five short novels written between 1945 and 1960 with reference to two literary theories recently formulated in Britain and Germany: Garrard's account of the aims and methods of ecocriticism, and Finke and Zapf's understanding of literature as cultural ecology. Situated midway between the Inner Émigrés of the Third Reich and environmentally committed writers in the 1970s and 1980s, Schmidt dramatises the clash between conceptions of nature as order and chaos in pessimistic, autobiographically coloured narratives conveying a blistering critique of postwar conservatism and Cold War politics. His Warnutopien combine fantasies of withdrawal from society to a simple life in natural surroundings with apocalyptic warnings of nuclear destruction. Schmidt's creative adaptation of the genres of apocalypse, idyll and utopia (identified by Garrard as central environmentalist tropes) is examined, and his distinctive contribution to nature discourse in the 1950s is discussed as an example of the ability of literature, a complex medium of symbolic representation, to serve as a sphere of experimentation and innovation, helping readers overcome the self-destructive dynamic of modern civilisation.
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December 11, 2007
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The interest in ethical literary criticism which re-emerged in the 1990s is of particular relevance to the field of ecologically oriented literary criticism. Motivated by a concern for the environment and by the question of how to live an environmentally sound life, its basic goal can be defined as creating knowledge that promotes an environmental ethical stance that in turn triggers processes of environmentally benign social and cultural transformation. The claim – made by moral philosophers and literary critics such as Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty and David Parker – that literary texts can be regarded as a specific mode of moral inquiry because of the imaginative range and formal richness of their language bears a high degree of importance for ecologically oriented literary scholarship. It supports the idea that literary texts which address morally relevant aspects of the human-nature relationship are indispensable sources for a more comprehensive understanding of the human moral experience – more comprehensive in the sense of extending the moral universe towards the inclusion of parts of nonhuman nature or to non-human nature as a whole. Following a brief introduction into key issues of current ethical literary criticism and into the field of environmental ethics, this essay explores New England regionalist texts by Sarah Orne Jewett as sites of inquiry into environmentally relevant moral issues. Jewett's texts were part of the emergence of American environmentalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. They contributed to the environmentalist discourse as it developed in particular in the activities and publications of movements such as the conservation, preservation and humane movements. Analysis of the environmental ethical dimension of her texts reveals that the sources of the contemporary philosophical discipline of environmental ethics can be understood as reaching far back into literary history.
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December 11, 2007
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A new relationship between nature and culture as it is required by ecocritics implies a relinquishment of anthropocentrism and a revaluation of the natural environment. Contrary to the radical poststructuralist idea that there is no extratextual reality, ecocritics assume the existence of nature ‘out there’ as an autonomous agent and, at the same time, as culturally inscribed. Nature and culture are imbricated, influencing each other in multiple ways. A special challenge to environmental writers has been to explore the aesthetic possibilities of giving nature a voice, although nature is clearly different from the human, although it cannot literally speak. The following essay focuses on the concept of language and of literature as a means of communication between the human and the nonhuman from an ecocritical point of view. It will use Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams as a model text to demonstrate the aesthetic strategies of a writer who grapples with the difficulty of articulating nonhuman nature as an active agent.
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December 11, 2007
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In this article, three ways of writing about nature are distinguished: anthropocentric, anthropomorphic and physiocentric styles. While anthropocentric language names natural phenomena according to their use for humans, anthropomorphic and physiocentric styles are indicative of different degrees of ecological awareness. This threefold distinction is applied to the analysis of a number of English nature poems with a focus on D. H. Lawrence. The analysis shows that it is a simplification to see Lawrence only as a poet who celebrates the divine “Otherness” of Nature. Rather, Lawrence's writing on Nature underwent a development from chiefly human-centred attitudes to an awareness of environmental problems in the modern sense with, in his last poems, extreme criticism of modern competitive society and its exclusive reliance on economic growth. The article also investigates the language of the American conservationist writer Aldo Leopold and, finally, makes an attempt to use the above-mentioned distinction of styles for an analysis of native American poetry.
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December 11, 2007
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Describing nature in ecological terms is well established in natural science, but the same perspective for describing culture in the cultural sciences is rather a new development following the traces of Bateson's “ecology of mind”. The paper outlines the main features of “Evolutionary Cultural Ecology” as it has recently been developed by the “Evolutionary Cultural Ecology Research Group” (E. C. E.). It explains culture as an ecosystemically organized product of overall evolutionary processes. Therefore, the core of the new approach consists of a theory of so-called cultural ecosystems and will be represented by three methodological, three theoretical and three practical principles. Amongst other questions, the treatment of cultural energy, language and the conception of borders is characteristic for it, and it is argued that literature could be fruitfully reconstructed within the framework of cultural ecosystems theory. In the beginning and at the end of the article, some consequences for general anthropology are discussed.
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December 11, 2007