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TCG's
ECO-ANIMAL/ ECOCRITICISM
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(photo credit: Dr. Joseph R. Spies, Ceaseless Explorer ) |
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TCG's
ECO-ANIMAL/ ECOCRITICISM
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(photo credit: Dr. Joseph R. Spies, Ceaseless Explorer ) |
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 Epigraphs |
Terminology |
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| Outline of Eco-Theoretical "Schools" |
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| Eco-Links |
Eco-Reading List (and "Quotable Quotes") |
| Other TCG Pages, etc. |
A Word from Our Sponsor |
| --An Audio Message from
Our "Sponsors"--
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Ecocriticism (n.): "the dialogic intersection of nature, culture,
and literature" --TCG
(Addendum: This "intersection" includes a thoughtful critique of "ecology" and the environmental movement per se. But "stage one"--the call to an "ecological consciousness"--remains the order of the day.)
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. --Zenrin poem |
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From the Top
social ecology: Murray Bookchin, 1962
deep ecology: Arne Naess, 1972
ecosophy: Arne Naess, 1972
ecofeminism (écoféminisme): Françoise D'Eaubonne, 1972
literary ecology: Joseph W. Meeker, 1972
speciesism: Richard D. Ryder, 1975(?) (popularized by Peter Singer)
bioregion(alism): Raymond Dasmann & Peter Berg, 1977(?)
ecocriticism: William Rueckert, 1978
ecopsychology: Theodore Roszak, 1992
ecological (literary) criticism: Cheryll (Burgess) Glotfelty, 1989; Karl Kroeber, 1994
*adapted from Glotfelty
Am not I
For I dance
If thought is life
Then am I
She in a mother's care, her beauty's pride
Long may ye roam these hermit waves. . . .
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
"a person who judges the merits and faults of writings that depict the
effects of culture upon nature, with a view towards celebrating nature, berating
its despoilers, and reversing the harm through political action."
TCG's Literary Criticism & Theory Page
(TCG's) Bird Links ("cobweb" stuff)
:
ecology: coined by Ernst Haeckel, 1866 (eco- from Late Latin for "household,"
from Greek for "house," "dwelling")
(some) Terminology From the Top
Outline of Eco-theory "Schools"/Types
[UPDATED OUTLINE--for my 2006 LitCrit/Theory class:] ECOCRITICISM Background–"Schools" of ECOLOGY, etc. Social Ecology [neo-Marxist]: capitalism's mistreatment of the working class/poor ≈ exploitation of the environment [Murray Bookchin, 1962] Deep Ecology [vs. "shallow ecology," mainstream environmentalism]: radical (eco-) or bio-egalitarianism (also: ecocentrism); anti-anthropocentrism (aka homocentrism) [Arne Naess, 1972; D. E. also a major influence on the development of the next two:] Ecofeminism –patriarchal oppression of women ≈ exploitation of the environment [Françoise D'Eaubonne, 1972; e.g., Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land (1975) and Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature (1978)] Spiritual Ecology –intuitive/"feeling"/"spiritual"-based relationship with the land and other species, often based upon New Age beliefs (such as Lovelock's "Gaia") and/or Native American tribal wisdom [e.g., Linda Hogan] Ecopsychology –the relationship of human consciousness to the environment (vs. ego-psychology) [e.g., Scott Slovic] Environmental Justice –colonialist oppression of the indigenous/3rd world ≈ exploitation of the environment [e.g., Joni Adamson]
[Animal
Rights?!]
–e.g., Peter Singer (speciesism [Animal Liberation, 1975]), Thomas Regan
Literary criticism per se
ECOCRITICISM [coined by William Rueckert, 1978]; ≈ literary ecology [Joseph Meeker, 1972]; ≈ ecological literary criticism [e.g., Cheryll Glotfelty, 1989; Karl Kroeber, 1994]; ≈ environmental criticism [Lawrence Buell, 2005] . . . also: ecopoeticsStages of Ecocriticism*
From the Top
Ecological/Ecocritical Links
Association for the Study of Literature & Environment
Introduction to Ecocriticism (ASLE)
Defining Ecocritical Theory and Practice
--1994 Western Literature Association Meeting (ASLE)
Ecology Hall of Fame (Ecotopia)
Ecological Philosophy (erraticimpact.com)
Ecofeminist Philosophy (erraticimpact.com)
ECO BOOKS: The Environmental Bookstore
ECO BOOKS on Ecological Literature and Criticism
The Environmental Mailing List Archives (earthsystems.org)
The Social Ecology Project (Bookchin, et al.)
The Institute for Deep Ecology
Green Psychology/Ecopsychology/Ecological Worldview (greenearth.org)
Romantic Circles: Green Romanticism on the Web
The Greening of Women's Studies: Bibliographies and Other Resources
Earth First! The Radical Environmental Journal
Black Rose Books by Subject: Ecology
"Chickadee Alert!!"
(Alaska Biological Science Center)
From the Top
{My own (brief) commentaries are in dark red; some "cool quotes"
are in framed white boxes (frames). . . . More complete bibliographical info on specific texts
(and quots.) is available upon request. . . . Finally, the relative emphasis on
animal rights and birds--indeed, the emphasis thereon throughout this web page--stems from my Ph.D.
dissertation focus, on "avian alterity."}
Reading List--and (more) "Quotable Quotes" Primary Sources/Precursors:English Romantics, etc.
I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken nature's holy union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
'An fellow mortal!
--from "To a Mouse"
Botanical lust revealed! Read about Clandestine
Marriages and Feminine Males! See the Linnaean system set to heroic couplets! Wonder
at how each plant inspires Darwin into lengthy, irrelevant Homeric-simile asides!
Journals/letters on the fauna and flora of White's home locale, for which
he is the "perfect spy"! Noteworthy are White's comments on the rampant animal cruelty and
superstitions of the time, although he shoots more than a few specimens himself, for research, and is
bent on proving that swallows and swifts hibernate.
--The Complete Poetry and Prose
Little Fly
Thy summers play,
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away.
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
And drink & sing;
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
And strength & breath;
And the want
Of thought is death;
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.
--"The Fly"
Aside from the "quaint" woodcut illustrations, some of Bewick's textual
anthropomorphisms are also precious: hawks and owls are armed for "rapine and
destruction"; magpies are "addicted" to "stealing and hoarding"; and a flock of
jays sounds like a "distant meeting of disorderly drunken persons." (All that
this really tells us is that Bewick's England had lots of human violence,
thievery, and drunkenness?!) As for the skylark, although Bewick includes
footnotes regarding the _taste_ of several species, he finds it "not a little
reproachful to humanity[!]" that these songsters are still being slain by the
thousands for food: indeed, "the prodigious numbers that are frequently caught
are truly astonishing." . . . A few scans of Bewick's bird etchings can be
seen on my Wordsworth's Birds page.
Restrain that rage for power, that bids a Man,
Himself a worm, desire unbounded rule
O'er beings like himself: Teach the hard hearts
Of rulers, that the poorest hind, who dies
For their unrighteous quarrels, in thy [God's] sight,
Is equal to the imperious Lord, that leads
His disciplin'd destroyers to the field.--
--from The Emigrants (2.424-430)
--Complete Poetical Works
TCG's Wordsworth Page
TCG's Wordsworth's Birds
[--Swan Mother & Cygnets--]
Forgets, unweary'd watching every side,
She calls them near, and with affection sweet
Alternately relieves their weary feet;
Alternately they mount her back, and rest
Close by her mantling wings' embraces prest.
--from An Evening Walk
Dorothy's domestic-chore tedium is broken up by many "Walks" out of doors, and
descriptions & reflections that support her self-proclaimed identity as a
"real lover of Nature"; highlights include two touching pairs of lovers: the
barn swallows outside her window, and occasional moments of her and her
"Darling" brother side by side, "deep in Silence and Love," much as Dorothy
imagines "her" favorite swallow pair to be.
Clare's obsession with detailed descriptions of eggs and
nests in his many bird poems may not always result in "aesthetic" success, but the combination
of naturalist interests with a poetic soul may be unparalleled to this day. And while his related
obsession with the security of a mother bed's nest begs for a psychoanalytical treatment,
Clare's transcendence of the species, as it were, is, at times, nothing short of amazing
(as is his outrage against rampant tree-chopping):
I feel at times a love and joy
For every weed and every thing
A feeling kindred from a boy
A feeling brought with every spring
--from "The Flitting"
* * * * * * * *
Change cheats the landscape every day
No tree no bough about it grows
That from the hatchet can repose
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Spring comes and goes and comes again
And all is nakedness and fen
--from "The Fens"
See Darwin get seasick! See Darwin embarrass himself with a bola!
See Darwin cringe at the sight of those dang "disgusting" vultures! (And cringe yourself when good Charles
considers the natives so much "like animals" that they apparently qualify as subjects of "natural
history" themselves!)
After so much evidence for evolution, it's a strange
conclusion, this: "[N]o one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between
civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain that whether from them or not, he is
assuredly not of them." Hmmm: this sounds like a disingenuous bone
tossed to his Victorian audience still in the ideological clutches of the Great
Chain of Being, since these three essays' actual evidence (especially the
comparison of human & gorilla skulls) is a pretty much a subversion of such a "gulf."
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew--
Hack and rack the growing green!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her. . . .
--from "Binsey Poplars"
* * * * * * * *
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
--from "Inversnaid"
Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had
been living--a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind,
animate and inanimate--"nature," as people used to call it--as one thing, and
mankind as another? It was natural for people thinking in this way, that they
should try to make "nature" their slave, since they thought "nature" was
something outside them.
American Romantics, etc.
--Ecology Hall of Fame: Thoreau
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
No one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
--from Song of Myself, section 32
--Ecology Hall of Fame: John Burroughs
--Ecology Hall of Fame: John Muir
--Sierra Club: John Muir Exhibit
Ecologists and Animal-Rights/"Eco-"Scholars:
--Marx + ecology = "social ecology"
--Ecology Hall of Fame: Rachel Carson
--the original ecofeminist manifesto
The mini-essays on taxonomy, famous ornithologists, etc., are
worth the price of admission themselves.
--"'A Most Absorbing Game': Peterson's Field Guide &
The New World Bird as Colonized Other" (my essay in Ampersand 11 [e-journal])
Get back--to the Pleistocene! Witness a psychoanalysis of
humankind via Pooh Bear and Smokey the Bear! Seriously, a great study of how humans' co-evolution
with other species has fashioned our language, culture, and psyche.
--Animal Liberation (ECO BOOKS: blurb, excerpts)
Cultural/Literary Ecocritics:
When there have been a few more accidents at nuclear power stations, when there
are no more rain forests, and when every wilderness has been ravaged for its
mineral resources, then let us say "There is no nature."
* * * * * * * *
[Regarding Wordsworth's concluding sonnet on the River Duddon, Bate laments:] but
now it is not only water that glides inexorably into the sea off Wordsworth's
coast. [And, as for Wordsworth's "There was a Boy" (and opposed to the
deconstructive readings thereof):] [L]et us not forget that it is also about a boy
alone by a lake at dusk blowing mimic hootings to unseen owls. Which are there
to answer him.
If like Thoreau one imagines animals as neighbors; if like Muir or traditional Native
Americans one imagines life-forms as plant people, sun youths, or grandmother spiders,
then the killing of flies becomes as objectionable as the killing of humans.
* * * * * * * *
Who is more likely to treat other people like machines, a person who has trained
herself to feel that plants and animals are fellow beings or a person who looks at
them as convenient resources?
--The Ecocriticism Reader -- Landmarks in Literary Ecology (ECO BOOKS: blurb, excerpts)
[Though tongue-in-cheek (in its original context), Howarth's description of today's
"ecocritic" is still one of the best I've come across. Such a scholar is . . .]
--from "Some Principles of Ecocriticism"
--Ecological Literary Criticism -- Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (ECO BOOKS: blurb, excerpts)
Modern Eco-"Naturalist" Creative Writers:
--Ecology Hall of Fame: Edward Abbey
--Abbey's Web
--Desert Solitaire (ECO BOOKS: blurb, excerpts)
[--my text file of intriguing quotations from DESERT SOLITAIRE,
organized under "thematic" headings--]
--The Unsettling of America -- Culture & Agriculture (ECO BOOKS: blurb, excerpts)
Great collection of "animal/nature" poems (despite Bly's Jungian
spin), from the German Romantics (in translation) to Snyder, Levertov, et al.
Encounter dang near every "rationalist" and "poetic" argument
for and against animal rights still worthy of consideration, in the guise of a rather
postmodernist fictional tale. (So don't expect any ready answers from the author, despite his general
sympathies.)
--EarthSaint: Annie Dillard (earthlight.org)
--The Man from the Sunflower Forest: A Loren Eiseley Reader
--"The Judgment of the Birds" (great essay from The Immense Journey)
--Ecology Hall of Fame: Leopold
In Sand County Almanac, a game manager turns poet and witty aphorist: follow the stories
the rings of an oak, of black-capped chickadee #65290, and of "atom X" on its biotic journey to the
sea; be inducted into the "land ethic," an "extension of the social conscience from people to
land."
--EarthSaint: Mary Oliver (earthlight.org)
--The Practice of the Wild (ECO BOOKS: blurb, excerpts)
The USA slowly lost its mandate
in the middle and later twentieth century
it never gave the mountains and rivers,
trees and animals,
a vote.
--from "Tomorrow's Song" (Turtle Island)
* * * * * * * *
Behind is a forest that goes to the Arctic
And a desert that still belongs to the Piute
And here we must draw
Our line.
--from "Front Lines" (Turtle Island)
Native American Writers (and related ecocriticism):
Almanac of the Dead: Main characters in Silko's
revolution include the Spirit Macaws and the Great Stone Snake; occasional digs at
Deep Ecology are also provocative.
Vizenor's redefinition of/distinction between the
"authentic" metaphor and "inauthentic" simile may be one of the best avenues for an
ecocritical approach to alter-speciality in literature. (Cool, too, is his reading of
Momaday as a veritable "bear"!)
Cool "Eco"-Sci-Fi:
An unforgettably haunting parable of species exploitation,
with a hell of a surprise ending.
Seems quaint now, perhaps, but it was a shock for this boy when he first saw
such an imaginative portayal of Darwinianism at work on the big screen.
Cool "Eco"-Tunes: (and so I date--and gender--and genre--myself!)
--"Ship of Fools"
--"When the Music's Over"
--"Perfect Water"
--"Godzilla"
History shows again and again
How Nature points out the folly of man . . . Godzilla!
--"Ridin' the Storm Out"
--"Once in a Lifetime"
--"Earth Died Screaming"
--"Bad Touch" (okay, so it's perversely bio- [or mammo-]centric)
You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals
So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel
--and not to forget my favorite early-childhood . . .
"Eco"-Novel:"Eco"-Movie: From the Top
Brought to you by . . .
E
qual R
ights for O
ther S
pecies ©TCG
--MORE STUFF--
http://incolor.inetnebr.com/tgannon/ecocrit.html
First Created: 1/14/00
Last Revised: 4/17/07
