Literary Ecology and the Ethics of Texts

Abstract

Among the various “turns” in recent literary and cultural studies, the ecological turn and the ethical turn are perhaps the most conspicuous. They have both opened up promising new areas of transdisciplinary inquiry and are, in many ways, at the heart of current trends in the humanities. In my paper, I would like to look more closely at the relationship between ecology and ethics, with particular attention to the ways in which literature and literary studies can contribute in significant ways to that transdisciplinary dialogue. If one tried to point out some of the convergences and common tendencies within recent ecology and ethics, one could name the following: (1) Both of them newly focus on the relationship between text and life that has been reduced to only one pole in the pantextual and pansemiotic universe of postmodernism. (2) Both of them deal not only with facts but with values, that is, with a critical attitude to a given state of things and with the necessity to think beyond it and imagine possible alternatives. (3) For both of them, the relationship between culture and nature and thus between the natural sciences and the humanities seems to have special significance, even if they approach this relationship from different angles. (4) Both of them share the assumption of an interconnection between local and global issues and are, therefore, transcultural and transnational in orientation. At the same time, it is helpful to approach any such transdisciplinary dialogue from an awareness not only of the affinities, but also of the differences and indeed the tensions between the disciplines involved, which cannot simply be subsumed under each other’s premises. After all, ethics has been that discipline within traditional Western philosophy in which the opposition between culture and nature, human and nonhuman life provided the foundational terms and concepts. Human consciousness and conscience, the freedom of the will, the autonomy of the subject, the moral sense of good and evil, the hierarchy of values between the spiritual, intellectual, psychological, and physical spheres