A COMPARATIVE ECO-QUEER ANALYSIS OF THE SELECTED POEMS OF ALLEN GINSBERG, THOM GUNN, AND AGHA SHAHID ALI

Abstract

INTRODUCTION:Ecocriticism is the emerging branch of literary criticism. It starts in the early 1990s and is continuously flourishing due to its contemporary relevance. Basically ecocriticism talks about the connection between literature and the natural environment. It starts in USA in late 1980s with William Rueckert's article Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in appeared in 1978. Rueckert is also the first to use the term ecocriticism. Another founding figure of Ecocriticism in USA is Cheryll Glotfelty, co-editor with Harold Fromm of Ecocriticism Reader: Landmark in Literary Ecology (1996). In UK ecocriticism is known as Green Studies and the founding figure of this approach is Jonathan Bate with his landmark work Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991). Before Bate, Raymond Williams has already pointed out the importance and use of nature in literature in his work Country and the City (1973).Ecocriticism is inspired by the works of nineteenth century American writers- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. In UK it is inspired by Romantic poets of early nineteenth century. All these writers put a lot of emphasis and focus on nature, natural scenes and landscapes. This tendency differentiates them from previous literary traditions like Neo-Classical school of poetry and the Age of Reason in UK and Puritinism and Enlightenment in America.The main focus of ecocriticism is to study how natural world is dealt in the literary works. Physical environment does not only mean the natural landscapes, but all that is naturally given to us like body, sex, complexion, age etc. As (Kerridge, 2006) states, Texts are evaluated in terms of their environmentally harmful or helpful effects. (2006, p. 530). Laurence Coupe, in his work, said that green theory 'debates Nature in order to defend nature' (Coupe, 2013, p. 155). (Garrard, 2012) describes the task of ecocriticism in these lines, The challenge for ecocritics is to keep one eye on the ways in which 'nature' is always in some ways culturally constructed, and the other on the fact that nature really exists, both the object and, albeit distantly, the origin of our discourse (212, p. 10).Now in these days, ecocriticism is incorporating other theoretical areas within its range as Ecofeminism, Deconstruction Ecology, Deep Ecology, Social Ecology, Eco-Marxism, and most recent Queer Ecology. focus of each of these sub-areas, within ecocriticsm, is the study of nature in relation to the particular issues related to their previous fields. Ecofeminism explores the relationship or affinity between nature and females. Similarly Deconstruction Ecology talks about how a focus on nature can deconstruct the anthropocentric view of humanity.The long standing debate of Queer Theory - whether the homosexuality is a cultural construction or natural? - can be discussed more comprehensively and analytically through the help of ecocriticism, by stating the fact that a lot of plants, animals, sea-creatures, birds and almost all the flowers are either homosexual, bisexual, intersexual, autosexual or hermaphrodite, Plants and animals are hermaphroditic before they are bisexual and are bisexual before they are heterosexual. (Morton, 2010, p. 276). So if all these natural beings can be homosexual then why can't human being. In this way queer ecology provides a queer way of thinking environmentally and an ecological way of thinking queerly. It is not that we have to search how environment or nature is used in queer texts, but the very construction and manipulation of queerness and nature is the issue. Sandilands and Erickson describes the task of queer ecology as, Queer, then, is both noun and verb in this project: ours is an ecology that may begin in the experiences and perceptions of non-heterosexual individuals and communities, but is even more importantly one that calls into question heteronormativity itself as part of its advocacy around issues of nature and environment-and vice versa. …