Research Paper

Literature

Volume : 3 | Issue : 1 | January 2013 | ISSN - 2249-555X

Ecology in Relation to Ecocriticism – A Theoretical
Approach
Keywords

Ecosystem, ecological concern, ecocriticism, theoretical analysis.

V. Shoba

Dr. P. Nagaraj

PhD Research Scholar, Department of English and Foreign
Assistant Professor, Department of English and Foreign
Languages, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India Languages, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
ABSTRACT One has to learn from nature, failing, he had not lived at all is the opinion of Henry David Thoreau. Whatever human beings do to the ecosystem have the reflections back. If man does not harm nature, the nature keeps him safe.
Ecological concerns …show more content…

In The Comedy of Survival Studies in Literary Ecology (1974), Joseph Meeker summons “for a careful examination of literature’s role in determining the relationship between nature and humans” (Schubnell 2001
Nr.9). ASLE’s Graduate Handbook states “examining literature through an ‘ecocritical lens’” is an apt way of defining ecocriticism. This statement is found in the essay “Blues in
The Green: Ecocriticism under Critique” by Michael P. Cohen. One can refer also to this study as “nature writing” or
“environmental literature” or “green reading”. The book
New Literary History (1999) puts forth that ecocriticism challenges “interpretation to own grounding in the bedrock of natural fact; in the biospheric and indeed planetary conditions without which human life, much less human letters, could not exist”. Ecocriticism, being a literary movement,
“claims as its hermeneutic environment nothing short of the literal horizon itself, the finite environment that a reader or writer occupies thanks not just culturally coded determinants

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Research Paper but also to natural determinants that antedate these and will outlast them” (Buell 1999 p. 505).
In the Modern Language Association’s “Forum on Literatures of the Environment”, Lawrence Buell, chair of the English
Department at Harvard writes literature to be in relation to physical environment. This dates back to the