Ecocritical Readings Rethinking Nature and Environment

By Shivani Jha

Through a reading of selected literary texts Shivani Jha integrates nature and society and demonstrates the outcome when one is severed from the other. The first two chapters on The Hungry Tide and Walden take into account the dispossessed aspect of both the human and the nonhuman worlds and point towards environmental conservation and sustainable development. The next two chapters based on the works of T.S Eliot and Herman Melville highlight the anthropocentric attitude of humans, the havoc it wreaks on the nonhuman world and the impact it has on the human psyche. The last two chapters are readings in deep ecology that dwell on works of Wordsworth and Hemingway directing the readers gaze to the pristine, natural world and the harmonious relationship that the humans are capable of having with it. The focus of the book is on reviewing the relationship of humans and environment and the need for recognizing the rights of the nonhumansthe aim that underlies the theoretical paradigm of ecocriticism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: May 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482844191

Shivani Jha

Shivani Jha has done her specialization in the field of ecocriticism and has presented papers in several national and international seminars. Currently, she is teaching at Bharati college, University of Delhi. She is in the process of editing a book on ecocriticism, “Ecocriticism and Environmental Praxis.”

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Copyright © 2015 by Shivani Jha.

ISBN:      Softcover   978-1-4828-4420-7

                eBook        978-1-4828-4419-1

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Part I The Dispossessed

1.   The Hungry Tide:

Moving Towards Sustainable Development

2.   Discovering the Forgotten Mate:

Thoreau’s Walden and Beyond

Part II Anthropocentricism, Environment

and the Human Psyche

3.   The Weary Wanderers:

Reading Environmental Degradation and

Dejection in Selected Works of T. S. Eliot

4.   Plundering the Blue Waters: Reading Moby-Dick

as a Tale of Environmental Orientalism

Part III Readings in Deep Ecology

5.   The Old Man and the Sea:

A Deep Ecological Treatise

6.   Donning the Green Lens with Wordsworth: Reading The Prelude and Other Poems

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Preface

Environment forms one of the major concerns in terms of the survival of the human race and its growth. The growing exploitation of the environment has had a menacing impact not only on the non-human world but also on the human. Ecology and social adaptation were interconnected in the past centuries; this was replaced by materialistic practices as the demands from the environment arose. It is noted that nature’s resources and the social life of humans are based on complex reciprocal relationships, which when interfered with disrupt ecological systems resulting in alarming damage to the human and the non-human world. The overemphasis on rationality and scientific progress has affected the organic solidarity between environment and human existence, leading to disillusionment and despair among other effects, thus the need to return to a way of thought and existence which is more holistic than what is prevalent now with the understanding of the intrinsic worth and equal rights of the non-humans to inhabit the earth.

Ecocriticism is variously defined as a ‘scholarly site that engenders fertile cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural analysis’ (Arnold 1089), an attempt to locate literature in the context of an ecological vision (William Rueckert, cited by Elizabeth Dodd), and a critical effort that analyzes literary representation of human environmental relations at various points of history/time, values assigned to nature, and natural perceptions moulding literary ‘tropes and genres’ (Heise 1097). The term ‘ecocriticism’ itself was coined by Rueckert in 1978. The history of ecocriticism can be conveniently divided into three waves as Cheryll Glotfelty did in The Ecocriticism Reader. In the first wave, the representation of nature became the focus of attention, in both its presence and absence, the absence leading to the question why. However, the purview of the critic’s focus encompassed the human, the marginalized, the pollutant, pollution, and the topography (Glotfelty 1996).

According to Buell, Thornber, and Heise, the first-wave writings of the 1990s, which were ‘rooted in deep ecology’, displayed the tendency of equating environment with nature with a focus on literary representations of the natural world in all genres of literature, including the non-fiction with a focus on biological, psychological/spiritual bonds between the two entities—the human and the non-human. The commonalities were explored in the spirit of ecocentric/biocentric ethics and environmental justice for the purpose of conservation of the natural world. Some of the important writers/poets relevant during this period are William Wordsworth, Henry Thoreau, Robert Frost, and Thomas Hardy—the noteworthy critics being Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the postcolonial approach made its mark with the place-based focus shifting to ‘displacements’ seen in the first chapter ‘The Hungry Tide: Moving Towards Sustainable Development’. The second wave of Ecocritical studies gained its strength from the environmental justice movement taking in its purview the rural, urban, and suburban environments, overcoming the nature–human disjunction to see both as ‘interdependent and mutually constitutive’ (Garrard 2010). It also gave prominence to nature writing as seen in Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, and Annie Dillard amongst others. The ecocritics also utilized critical theories as deconstructive, Bakhtinian, feminist, psychoanalytic, and New Criticism. Writers like Gary Snyder, Adrienne Rich, Willa Cather, and Alice Walker received much attention in this phase. Glotfelty traces the third wave of ecocriticism to ecofeminism, questioning the binaries as nature/culture, mind/body, men/women, leading to a disjunction between humanity and nature, whereas Garrard believes that in this phase, the gaze of the critic shall extend from the rural to the urban landscapes, the ‘built environment’.¹

This book is divided into three sections in order to delineate the varied attitude that we, humans, have adopted towards nature through the passage of time. I do not contest that these attitudes are strictly confined to a given period. Rather, they tend to overlap and can be found in various mild/extreme forms at locations other than the ones mentioned. The delineation here is strictly from the purpose of recognizing the outcome of these attitudes on the human and the non-human components of the world. From the Holocene, humans have progressed to the Anthropocene period of the geological era, marking extreme human intervention with the natural ecosystems. In such a scenario, the role of literature in bringing about environmental consciousness and sensitivity becomes critical, for every text is the proof of the social, political, and economic developments of its times, which reflect the attitudinal biases and leanings of the dominating culture. The texts chosen here are landmarks in their own field and have further implications than recorded so far. Their relevance increases when seen from an interdisciplinary perspective of changes in rural and urban ecology, having an unprecedented impact on human psychology. Had the impact been positive, there would have been no cause for alarm, but in the given scenario of environmental degradation and rising extinction of non-human species, human accountability towards the environment and conversely on their own future increases. Through the readings here, the book attempts to record the prevalent attitudes so far and the possible ones.

The first part of the book under the rubric ‘The Dispossessed’, dwells on the idea that we, the humans, have come a long way, and in this steady march of progress, we have to make space equally for both the humans and the non-humans in the spirit of harmony, reciprocity, equity and justice, extending the respect and love that they deserve. The idea is exemplified with the help of Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.

The second section, ‘Anthropocentrism, Environment and the Human Psyche’ centres on the exploitation of the nonhuman world and the consequences of such an attitude. What happens when the ties of harmony break with the surroundings? This is the question answered and reflected in the polluted landscape and defeated people of the wasteland.

‘Return to Nature’ may be Thoreau’s response to the environmental changes of the nineteenth century, but humans have traversed a long passage in the path of progress. The answer now lies not in returning to the ‘what was’ but ‘what can be’ in the given scenario of overpopulation, pollution, and scarcity—the outfall of the human march of progress. The ecocritic does not believe in despair, the role of authors, writers, and littérateurs goes much beyond exploring and mirroring mere emotions, a sense of accountability goes with writing, bordering on the charge of being called ‘didactic’. This commitment towards the environment is the unifying thread running across all the chapters.

‘Readings in Deep Ecology’ directs the gaze of the reader from an individualistic stance to a harmonious one, an existence based on the idea of holistic relationship with regard to the environment and the nonhuman world as the destruction of one sounds the death knell for the other.

Acknowledgements

During the long process of putting this book together, there are people who have turned out to be my rock of Gibraltar. I am deeply grateful to them. First and foremost, I would like to thank Prof. P. C. Kar at the Forum on