Ecocritical Approaches Research Articles

“Imaginations of the Strangest Kind”: The Vital Materialism of Virginia Woolf

This article argues that Virginia Woolf brings the nonhuman world to the forefront of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse in order to challenge the primacy of human agency in her decentering of the human and her recognition of the vitality of all matter. Focusing on the character of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway and the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse , this article demonstrates how Woolf’s rendering of the relationships between the human and the nonhuman worlds embodies Jane Bennett’s theory of “ vital materialism .” Moving beyond traditional ecocritical approaches to literature, Bennett’s vital materialism considers the agencies of inorganic, nonhuman materialities and objects—as well as organic, natural materialities and human beings—and their roles in shaping the world. Reading Woolf’s works through the lens of vital materialism brings a deeper understanding to Woolf’s vision of the world in which all life and matter are connected and intermeshed.

Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction: By Laura Barbas-Rhoden. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011. P. x, 176. Notes. Works Cited. Index. $74.95 cloth.

Reviewed by: Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction by Laura Barbas-Rhoden Scott M. DeVries Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction. By Laura Barbas-Rhoden. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011. Pp. x, 176. Notes. Works Cited. Index. $74.95 cloth. Among several recent collections of essays and single-author books with ecocritical analyses of Spanish- and Portuguese-language texts, Laura Barbas-Rhoden’s study of several recent works of fiction by Latin American authors who employ the “ecological imagination” represents an important entry in the catalogue of regionally focused eco-criticism. Barbas-Rhoden identifies several unique elements of ecocritical approaches to Latin American literature, but the most effective contribution is her extensive attention to historical contexts and her intended goal of providing a “broad sweep of environmental history as apprehended through fiction” (p. 2). The analysis achieves this aim through the consideration of novels set in three distinct regions of Latin America: extreme southern Argentina (Tierra del Fuego by Sylvia Iparraguirre, Un piano en Bahía desolación by Libertad Demitrópulos, and Fuegia by Eduardo Belgrano [End Page 566] Rawson); the Amazon (Mad María by Márcio Souza, Fordilandia by Eduardo Sguiglia, and Un viejo que leía novelas de amor by Luis Sepúlveda); and Central America (Murámonos Federico by Joaquín Gutiérrez, Calypso by Tatiana Lobo, La loca de Gandoca by Anacristina Rossi, ¿En quién piensas cuando haces el amor? by Homero Aridjis, and Waslala by Gioconda Belli). For each chapter, Barbas-Rhoden provides an excellent contextualization of the novels with respect to historical, social, and economic factors, for example, British neocolonialism, land-use politics, the development of export-led economies in the region, and subsequent environmental alterations within the landscapes where the novels are set. For example, the section on Rossi’s novel exhaustively documents the roles played by various interested parties that either contested or welcomed the construction of an eco-tourist resort in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Reserve in Costa Rica. These include a Canadian investor (Maurice Strong), national and local politicians, and the Kèköldi people and other residents of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Barbas-Rhoden also manages geographical and economic concepts effectively to construct a multilayered environmental history for the three regions represented in the literary texts she has selected for analysis. But the attention that Barbas-Rhoden devotes to historical contexts also represents something of a minor problem for the book. The title makes reference to “ecological imaginations,” but I found the ecocriticism somewhat lacking. The explicit environmentalism in Aridjis, Belli, and Rossi must force an ecocritical reading and Barbas-Rhoden indeed employs that approach (especially, eco-feminism) in the sections dedicated to those novels. Yet, she writes that the most important element in Mad María “is the criticism of modernization born of collaborations between American investors and Latin American politicians” (p. 68). Sometimes a critic may allow readers to infer the connection between his or her analysis and whatever the principal approach may be within a monograph, especially if that approach is named in the title. But in this case, the idea of an “ecological imagination” does not make an appearance in the analysis of Souza’s novel. On the contrary, Barbas-Rhoden claims that the Brazilian author does not employ “ecocentric depictions” and that “contemporary environmental rhetoric does not color his portrayal of the Amazon” (p. 70). Later, she mentions that in both Mad Maria and Sguiglia’s Fordilandia the “best practices for the future of human and non-human nature are not clear, and neither is the ecocritical message” (pp. 97–98). Throughout most of her book the focus is on various social and political concerns, but connections specific to ecological issues are not fully pursued. On one occasion in the analysis of the novel by Demitrópulos, there is reference to “a pressing question about the nature of civilization and barbarism” but the answer is not forthcoming, only the observation that it “bears further analysis from an ecocritical perspective” (p. 47). My concern is that in a book whose title centers on “ecological imaginations” such analysis should be the central focus, not something that bears further consideration elsewhere...

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ecocriticism and Eighteenth‐Century English Studies

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Ecocriticism and Eighteenth‐Century English Studies

Transcultural Risk Communication on Dauphin Island: An Analysis of Ironically Located Responses to the Deepwater Horizon Disaster

This article uses the ironic delivery sites of rhetorics surrounding the Deepwater Horizon disaster to foreground the importance of transcultural communication in constructing risk. Whereas hegemonic entities used community centers as spaces for dissemination, local actants took up digital media. With ecocritical and ecological-economic approaches, this article uses actor-network theory and the concept of digital guerrilla media to frame risk as being produced by complex transcultural networks that take into account the importance of location.

An Introduction to "Ecocritical Approaches to Food and Literature in East Asia": The Special Cluster

An Introduction to "Ecocritical Approaches to Food and Literature in East Asia": The Special Cluster

Grounding Southern Ecocriticism

Grounding Southern Ecocriticism Bart H. Welling (bio) Clear-Cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern Literature. By Christopher Rieger. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2009. 202202 pp. $39.75 cloth. Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World. By James L. Peacock. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010. 328328 pp. $22.95 paper. What might the future of southern ecocriticism look like? Although neither of them tackles this question directly, and one of them doesn't bill itself as a work of ecocriticism at all, two studies from the last few years—or, rather, the unacknowledged intersections, gaps, and frictions between the two—suggest that a variety of ecocriticism grounded in the literatures, cultures, and places of the U.S. South has some vibrant years ahead of it. First, though, it is worth asking where Christopher Rieger and James L. Peacock's books achieve, and where they stop short of achieving, this kind of grounding. As a clearly written and carefully researched work of (mostly) second-wave ecocriticism, Rieger's Clear-Cutting Eden lays a solid foundation for future ecocritical approaches to southern authors, particularly the main subjects of the study: Erskine Caldwell, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner. Rieger argues persuasively that the pastoral mode of literature is more "adaptable and complex" (171) than it may seem, and his explorations of subcategories such as the antipastoral, the wilderness pastoral, and what he terms the [End Page 129] "ecopastoral" represent meaningful contributions to ongoing ecocritical debates on the nature of the pastoral and its sustainability as a model for human life in a fragile world. In focusing on scenes of labor in novels produced during a historical period, the Great Depression, characterized by ecological devastation and, correspondingly, by enormous uncertainty regarding the issue of work itself, Rieger works hard to move beyond first-wave ecocriticism's tendency (see Buell 21) to treat the natural world as "an aesthetic object . . . or as an exotic 'other' that needs protection" (Rieger 16) rather than a set of places that humans, like other life-forms, cannot avoid inhabiting and/or transforming to some degree. Rieger's book does much to loosen the grip of "restrictive anthropocentric [nature-culture] dualisms" (72) on ecocriticism, even as the novels he examines perform similar kinds of work in their respective milieux. Rieger promises at the outset to "ground [his] ecocritical approach in the material and economic history" (8) of the Depression-era U.S. South, and largely lives up to this promise, as seen in his frequent invocations of environmental and social historians. However, Clear-Cutting Eden could be more fully grounded in other respects. While reading the book I kept hoping that Rieger would offer his own thick descriptions of southern landscapes, particularly those that embody what he sees as the liberatory potential of the ecopastoral vision. I also wanted him to pay closer attention to some of the "material-semiotic" connections (Haraway 383, n. 11) between the places his authors inhabited and the worlds they (re)created in their powerfully earthbound fictions. Rieger's study does succeed in adding "the environment" to the now-traditional southern studies repertoire of concerns including race, class, and gender, and in showing how these "themes" are entangled, but this is precisely where the book falls short from a materialist ecocritical perspective. By essentially accepting mainstream U.S. culture's view of "the environment" as one "issue" among many rather than the ground of all being and meaning, Rieger unintentionally marginalizes what ecocriticism should be in the business of foregrounding. True, the distance between nature and culture has been substantially narrowed, and the asymmetries between them have mostly been leveled; Clear-Cutting Eden resists both the mainstream humanities' fool's errand of reducing nature to culture and first-wave ecocriticism's perhaps equally reductive inversion of the hierarchy by subordinating culture (in the form of literary theory) to nature (or rather, paradoxically, to cultural representations of it). But by not attending sufficiently to human culture's profound embeddedness within [End Page 130] the biosphere, as well as to the liminal zones in southern fiction and in extratextual life where the very ideas of "nature" and...

Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Victorian Studies

AbstractSince the turn of the twenty‐first century a growing amount of scholarship has focused on the correlations between postcolonial studies and environmental criticism or ecocriticism. Despite the numerous ethical and political connections of global social justice and ecological crisis, postcolonial and ecocritical approaches have historically remained distant from one another. The emergence of postcolonial ecocriticism, however, has aimed to move beyond the mutual unease that has characterized the relationship of these two critical perspectives, formulating a more ecologically aware postcolonialism and a more politically conscious ecocriticism. While the majority of postcolonial‐ecocritical scholarship so far has concentrated on contemporary literature, postcolonial ecocriticism has particular relevance for Victorian Studies. As an era of intensive imperial expansion and industrial development, the nineteenth century comprised a pivotal stage in global environmental history that brought dramatic ecological change to many regions of the world in the same moment that it forged momentous political shifts. After introducing the theoretical premises of postcolonial ecocriticism and situating these within the environmental history of empire, this essay sketches some areas of possibility of this new critical approach for unpacking the global environmental resonances of Victorian literature, concluding with four suggested areas within which a Victorian postcolonial ecocriticism might unfold.

Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape

Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape

Ecocritical Approaches Reconsidered for Comprehensible Understanding of Nature Writing as Edge-Effect

Ecocritical Approaches Reconsidered for Comprehensible Understanding of Nature Writing as Edge-Effect

An Ecocritical Reading, Slightly Queer, of As for Me and My House

This essay argues that As for Me and My House is very much in need of ecocritical approaches that resist the kinds of cultural marginalization that have long been a part of the Canadian experience. The essay offers a fresh approach to Ross’s extensively analyzed novel, beginning with comments about the under-representedness of Canadian regional literature in the burgeoning field of ecocriticism (a field itself robustly American) and then developing a case that the distinctively Canadian context and traditions to which this slightly queer novel responds require a criticism that both differs from the American nature-celebration mode often associated with ecocriticism and addresses the novel’s complex representations of social responses to sexuality and to the natural environment. Such an approach reveals that the unpredictability of the land on the one hand and the compulsions of Philip on the other share a kind of theoretical alliance; an ecocritical approach allows us to hear the silenced voices of the land and of Philip, while affirming the importance of continued readings of this very central morsel of Canadian literature.

The state of the green: A review essay on Shakespearean ecocriticism

This essay reviews the ecocritical approaches to Shakespeare that have emerged in recent years. The “green” school of criticism can tell us new things about Shakespeare and about our present predicaments, but must also be treated as an intellectual phenomenon with a distinct role and history within the professionalization of literary criticism in academia. Exploring the unavoidable ethical implications of this professionalization, the article concludes that ecocriticism is ineluctably presentist and requires academics to change the ways they think and work.

Of Humans, Pigs, Fish and Apes: The Literary Motif of Human-Animal Metamorphosis and its Multiple Functions in Contemporary Fiction

Of Humans, Pigs, Fish, and Apes:The Literary Motif of Human-Animal Metamorphosis and its Multiple Functions in Contemporary Fiction1 Marion Gymnich and Alexandre Segão Costa […] she would try To stretch her arms, she had no arms to stretch. Would she complain, a moo came from her throat, A startling sound—her own voice frightened her. […] Her tears rolled down; if only words would come, She'd speak her name, tell all, implore their aid. For words her hoof traced letters in the dust— I, O—sad tidings of her body's change.2 The story of the beautiful Io, whom Jupiter transforms into a cow to hide his affair with her from his wife Juno and who, shedding bitter tears, manages to reveal her true identity to her father by tracing her name in the ground with her hoof, is just one of many instances of human-animal transformation in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The Metamorphoses, beyond doubt part of the canon of Western literature, has inspired many authors throughout the centuries, and it still constitutes an interesting touchstone for a discussion of literary representations of human-animal transformation in texts written in the second half of the twentieth century. The frequent explicit intertextual references to Ovid in recent literary representations of metamorphoses is evidence of the lasting impact of the Metamorphoses on Western literature and culture. The depiction of the metamorphosis in the story of Io shares a number of features with the stories about human-animal transformations that we will examine in more detail in this article. Firstly, the tension between radical physical changes on the one hand and the individual's mental and psychological state on the other hand constitutes a focal point of many stories about metamorphoses.3 The being that undergoes a process of transformation may either retain human feelings and thoughts beneath its animal appearance, as Io obviously does, or the metamorphosis may affect the mental level as well, bringing about novel or alien ways of perceiving the world. Secondly, the story of Io, like other stories of human-animal transformation in Ovid's Metamorphoses, suggests that the animal the human being is turned into somehow [End Page 68] resembles the individual who has been transformed. Io, for example, apparently retains part of her beauty even as a cow.4 Thirdly, Io's attempt to communicate with her father and to let him know what has happened points to difficulties with the use of language, which are often addressed in twentieth-century fiction as one of the consequences of a metamorphosis. In the novels we discuss here, the individual's struggle to explain his or her transformation by means of language either takes place among the characters, that is, on the story level, or is situated on the level of narrative transmission, involving a homodiegetic narrator striving to explain his or her metamorphosis to a narratee. Above and beyond these three issues associated with the motif of human-animal metamorphosis, a fourth important aspect of this motif is, of course, its potential to raise questions about the relationship between human beings and animals. Involving what is presumably the most intimate connection between human beings and animals imaginable, the depiction of a human-animal transformation is virtually bound to challenge culturally dominant assumptions about animals as the 'other' of humankind. This function is what makes the motif of human-animal metamorphosis particularly interesting from the point of view of current ecocritical approaches. Especially in recent fiction, the transformation of a human being into an animal is not necessarily seen in entirely negative terms, and this has interesting implications as far as the conceptualization of the relationship between human beings and animals, or even nature in general, is concerned. The relationship between human beings and animals has repeatedly been redefined by anthropology and biology. Charles Darwin's writings, for example, challenged the supremacy of man and induced a radical rethinking of the human-animal relationship. Since the 1970s, the ecological movement has contributed to a further fundamental reevaluation of the status of animals in relation to humankind and has in particular brought forth a vision of a fragile interdependence between human culture and non...

A Cormac McCarthy companion: the border trilogy

With essays by Edwin T. Arnold, J. Douglas Canfield, Christine Chollier, George Guillemin, Dianne C. Luce, Jacqueline Scoones, Phillip A. Snyder, Nell Sullivan, and John Wegner The completion of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy--All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998)--marked major achievement in American literature. Only ten years earlier this now internationally acclaimed novelist had been called the best unknown writer in America. The trilogy is McCarthy's most ambitious project yet, composed at the height of his mature powers over period of fifteen years. It is a miracle in prose, as Robert Hass wrote of its middle volume, an unsentimental elegy for the lost world of the cowboy, the passing of the wilderness, and the fading innocence of post--World War II America. The trilogy is literary accomplishment with wide appeal, for despite the challenging materials in each book, these volumes remained on bestseller lists for many weeks. This collection of essays is the first book to examine these novels as trilogy, the first to read them as an integrated whole. Together these explorations of McCarthy's magnum opus serve as an ideal companion reader. Represented here are nine of the most notable Cormac McCarthy scholars, both American and European. Their essays provide substantial exploration of the trilogy from different perspectives. Included are gender issues, eco-critical approaches, explications of the war or land history underlying the trilogy, studies of narrative voice, dreams, the cowboy tradition, and the pastoral tradition, and considerations of McCarthy's moral and spiritual outlook. These essays complement one another in highly provocative ways, prompting new appreciation of the complexity of McCarthy's work and the profundity of his vision. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce are editors of Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (University Press of Mississippi). This new volume is an admirable companion to Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, bringing McCarthy scholarship into the 21st century.

Environmental Justice and Third Wave Ecocritical Approaches to Literature and Film

Key words: environmental justice, globalization, indigenous peoples, third wave ecocriticism Using films such as Babel directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñartu, or novels such as Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko can raise consciousness on environmental justice issues and the consequences of globalization and free trade agreements for different communities around the world. Both works illustrate quite poignantly the meaning of such landmark manifestos such as the United Nations Declaration on the the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice or the Earth Charter. Likewise these approaches constitute the third wave of ecocriticism whose interests lie in exploring human experience from eco-global perspectives which transcend ethnic and national borders in research. Palabras clave: justicia medioambiental, globalización, pueblos indígenas, tercera oleada de la ecocríticaIncorporar al aula largometrajes como Babel de Alejandro Gonzalez Iñartu o novelas como Almanac of the Dead de Leslie Marmon Silko puede redundar en un aumento de la concienciación sobre la justicia medioambiental y fomentar la reflexión sobre las consecuencias de la globalización y del comercio libre en distintas comunidades que coexisten en el planeta. Ambos documentos resultan útiles para ilustrar el significado de otros tan importantes como la Declaración de las Naciones Unidas sobre los derechos de los pueblos indígenas, los 17 principios para la justicia ambiental y la Carta de la Tierra, al mismo tiempo que se inscriben en la tercera oleada de la ecocrítica cuyos intereses se centran en explorar la experiencia humana desde perspectivas ecoglobales y trascender las fronteras étnicas y nacionales en la investigación.