生态批评

Ecocriticism

生态批评是一个言人人殊的话语体。大多数人认同彻丽尔·格罗特费尔蒂的定义：“生态批评是探讨文学与自然环境之关系的批评。”一般认为，“生态批评”这一概念由美国学者威廉·鲁克尔曼1978年首次提出，他的《文学与生态学：一次生态批评实验》文章在《衣阿华评论》1978冬季号上刊出，以“生态批评”概念明确地将“文学与生态学结合起来”。1992年，“文学与环境研究会”在美国内华达大学成立。1994年，克洛伯尔出版专著《生态批评：浪漫的想象与生态意识》，提倡“生态学的文学批评”(ecological literary criticism)或“生态学取向的批

评”(ecological oriented criticism)。1995年在科罗拉多大学召开了首次研讨会，会议部分论文以《阅读大地：文学与环境研究的新走向》为书名正式出版（1998）。其后，生态批评的著作有如雨后春笋般地充斥文论界。[3]

1996年美国第一本生态批评论文集《生态批评读本》由格罗特费尔蒂和弗罗姆主编出版，其宗旨在于“分别讨论生态学及生态文学理论、文学的生态批评和生态文学的批评”，使得生态批评更具有文学批评的特征和范式。在导言中格罗特费尔蒂（Cheryll Glotfelty）给生态批评加以定义：“生态批评研究文学与物理环境之间的关系。正如女性主义批评从性别意识的视角考察语言和文学，马克思主义批评把生产方式和经济阶级的自觉带进文本阅读，生态批评运用一种以地球为中心的方法研究文学。” 1998年英国第一本生态批评论文集《书写环境：生态批评与文学》在伦敦出版，分生态批评理论、生态批评的历史、当代生态文学三个部分。这本由克里治和塞梅尔斯主编的著作认为：“生态批评要探讨文学里的环境观念和环境表现”。

1999年夏季的《新文学史》是生态批评专号，共发表十篇专论生态批评的文章，2000年出版的生态批评著作主要有默菲教授主编的论文集《自然取向的文学研究之广阔领域》，托尔梅奇等主编的《生态批评新论集》，贝特的《大地之歌》等。2001年，布伊尔出版了新著《为危险的世界写作：美国及其他国家的文学、文化与环境》，麦泽尔主编出版了《生态批评的世纪》。2002年年初，弗吉尼亚大学出版社隆重推出第一套生态批评丛书：“生态批评探索丛书”。美国的格伦·洛夫于2003年末出版的《实用生态批评》、英国的格雷格·加勒德于2004年8月出版的《生态批评》

对“生态批评”的定义，言人人殊，难有定论。米歇尔·P·布兰奇等人在《阅读大地》中说：“隐含（且通常明确包含）在这种新批评方式诸多作为之中的是一种对文化变化的呼唤。生态批评不只是对文学中的自然进行分析的一种手段，它还意味着走向一种更为生物中心的世界观，一种

伦理学的扩展，将全球共同体的人类性观念扩大到可以容纳非人类的生活形式和物理环境。正如女权主义和非裔美国文学批评呼唤一种文化变化，即通过揭露早期观点的狭隘性而努力促成一种更具包容性的世界观一样，生态批评通过考察我们关于自然世界之文化假定的狭隘性如何限制了我们展望一个生态方面可持续发展的人类社会的能力而呼唤文化的改变。” 哈佛大学英文系教授劳伦斯·布伊尔（Lawrence Buell）在其著作《环境想象：梭罗、自然书写和美国文化的构成》中将生态精神贯穿到文学和文学理论的更为深入的层面里。在这部堪称“生态文学批评的里程碑”的著作中，布伊尔将其矛头指向了20世纪以来文学和批评中的一个主要倾向：对真实世界的指涉维度的丧失。[4]布伊尔认为：生态批评通常是在一种环境运动实践精神下开展的。换言之，生态批评家不仅把自己看作从事学术活动的人。他们深切关注当今的环境危机，很多人还参与各种环境改良运动，他们还相信，人文学科，特别是文学和文化研究可以为理解及挽救环境危机做出贡献。生态批评是跨学科的。宣扬美学上的形式主义或是学科上的自足性是成不了生态批评家的。生态批评从科学研究、人文地理、发展心理学、社会人类学、哲学（伦理学、认识论、现象学）、史学、宗教以及性别、种族研究中吸取阐释模型。其结果显然是在不同的生态批评家之间产生了方法论上的巨大差异。随着生态运动的壮大，“生态批评”这一术语的含义也越来越复杂。起初使用它的是研究自然写作及自然诗歌的文学学者，这些作品着眼于非人类世界及其与人的关系。与之相应的是早期的生态批评家的理论假设也比今天简单。比如，许多早期的生态批评家强烈反对现代文本性理论，并宣称生态批评的核心任务是要强调文学应该使读者重新去与自然“接触”。

大致上可以说，“生态批评”是从文学批评角度进入生态问题的文艺理论批评方式，一方面要解决文学与自然环境深层关系问题，另一方面要关注文学艺术与社会生态、文化生态、精神生态的内在关联。生态批评关注文本如何拒绝、展示或者激发人类热爱生命的天性：“集中在生命进程或者类似生命进程中的内在人类倾向，激发起我们与非人类的自然世界联系的想象和情感。在宗教信仰带来的安全感、现代性的焦虑、后现代的碎片与混乱之后，作家们开始探索人类归属世界的新途径，探索在我们与自然之间发展一种谨慎而互惠型伦理的新途径。因此，生态批评的一个重要驱动力就是定位、敞开并且讨论这种表现在文学形式中的渴求。” [5]生态批评运用现代生态学观点考察文学艺术与自然、社会以及人的精神状态的关系，同时运用文学想想叙事手段透视生态文化，探索人在世界中的诗化生存状态，思考人、自然、艺术与批评三者关系——对人与自然征服与报复关系的反思，对生态艺术批评的人文原则的确定，对现代主体中心问题和多元价值新构造的推演。正是在这一点上，我同意《阅读大地》的编

者所说的：“具有生态敏感性的文学批评的一个重要作用就在于它具有一种潜能，推动人类全体成员培养起更加深厚的生态人文素养。”[6] 在我看来，生态批评有以下几个基本特征：

一，生态批评以研究文学中的自然生态和精神生态问题为主，力求在作品中呈现人与自然世界的复杂动向，把握文学与自然环境互涉互动关系。生态批评在文学批评中使用频率增加而范围不断扩大，因而生态批评已经作为文学理论的重要术语收入西方文论术语词典。

二，生态批评亦可从生态文化角度重新阐释阅读传统文学经典，从中解读出被遮蔽的生态文化意义和生态美学意义，并重新建立人与自我、人与他人、人与社会、人与自然、人与大地的诗意审美关系。

三，生态批评对艺术创作中的人的主体性问题保持“政治正确”立场——既不能有人类中心主义立场，也不能绝对地自然中心主义立场，而是讲求人类与自然的和睦相处，主张人类由“自我意识”向“生态意识”转变。人类与地球是共存亡的生命契合关系，人类不再是自然的主宰，而是大地物种中的一员，与自然世界中的其他成员生死与共。

四，生态批评将文学研究与生命科学相联系，从两个领域对文学与自然加以研究，注重从人类社会发展与生态环境变化角度进入文学层面，从而使生态批评具有了文学跨学科特性。生态批评是人类面对生态灾难之后的文学反思，是文学艺术家对人类在地球的地位的重新定位，是思想家对西方现代性弊端的重新清算。

五，生态批评在对生态文化现象进行观照时，承继了绿色革命的意识形态，强调不能背离文学精神和文学话语，而要尽可能在文学文本形式和艺术手法层面展开话语叙事，通过“文学性”写作的形式美手法去体现出生态文化精神。

六，生态批评的内容要求从生命本质和地球的双重视野中，考察人类的过去与未来存在状态。这一视角将已经流于形式主义的文学研究与危机重重的地球生存问题联系起来。文学从此可以抛弃形式主义的文字游戏，从语言消解的各种文学批评话语中振作起来，重新审视“人类的”生活意义和“世界的”生态意义。

总体上看，生态批评将文学与自然环境的关系作为自己研究的领域，它一方面必须是“文学性”研究，另一方面又必须触及到“生态性”问题。这种“文学性”与“生态性”的整合不同于其他的文学批评或文学理论。生态批评对人类未来充满希望，并不断呼唤着诗意乐观的生存态度，拒斥“对未来的绝望”，从而显示出生态批评的乐观主义精神特质。

当然任何一种新的理论出现，都有不完备乃至理论盲点，生态批评也不例外。这种新的批评模式在文学界引起广泛关注的同时，也得到社会的广泛批评。达纳·菲利普斯在《生态论的真相》一书中对生态批评提出若干异议，认为生态批评是旧瓶装新酒，理论上没有什么创新，而是用时髦

的术语哗众取宠而已；生态批评仍没有形成自恰的理论体系，其理论根据的匮乏使之只不过成为激情的叙述话语；生态文学批评充满野心，想当然地把相当复杂的进化论及生态理论纳入文学批评之中而难以消化。但不管怎么说，生态批评仍在西方文论的“文本喧哗”“话语游戏”中走出来，开始俯身生养死葬的大地，直面并关心人类存在的真实困境，这是不可否定的事实。

——生态文学与生态批评文论（下篇) 王岳川 （原载《北京大学学报》2009年第2期）

[3] 美国批评家斯莱梅克曾这样惊叹生态批评如此迅速地成为当今文学研究的显学：“从八九十年代开始，环境文学和生态批评逐渐成为一种全球性的文学现象。ecolist和ecocrit这两个新词根在期刊、学术出版物、学术会议、学术项目以及无数的专题研究、论文里大量出现，有如洪水泛滥。”生态批评的主要代表人物有格罗特费尔蒂、劳伦斯•布耶尔、乔纳森•贝特、埃里克•托德•史密斯、莫菲、多默尼克•海德等人 。

[4] Cf. Lawrence Buell: The enviroment imagination: Thoreau, nature writing and the formation of American culture, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995。

[5] Michael P. Branch (ed.), Reading the earth: new directions in the study of literature and environment, Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1998, xii.

[6] Michael P. Branch (ed.), Reading the earth, xii.

Ecocriticism

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Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. Ecocriticism was

[citation needed]

officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works, both published in the mid-1990s: The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, and The Environmental Imagination, by Lawrence Buell.

In the United States, ecocriticism is often associated with the

Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE),[citation needed] which hosts biennial meetings for scholars who deal with environmental matters in literature. ASLE publishes a journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)—in which current American scholarship can be found.

Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including \"green (cultural) studies\\"ecopoetics\", and \"environmental literary criticism\".

Contents

[hide]

• • • • •

1 Evolution of ecocriticism in literary studies 2 Definition 3 See also 4 Sources

5 External links

[edit] Evolution of ecocriticism in literary studies

Ecocritics investigate such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely, is meant by the word nature, and whether the examination of \"place\" should be a distinctive category, much like class, gender or race. Ecocritics examine human perception of wilderness, and how it has changed throughout history and whether or not current environmental issues are accurately represented or even mentioned in popular culture and modern literature. Other disciplines, such as history, philosophy, ethics, and psychology, are also considered by ecocritics to be possible contributors to ecocriticism.

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term

ecocriticism (Barry 240). In 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism. His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” (Reprinted in The Ecocritism Reader on p. 107) Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of ecotheory and criticism since the explosion of

environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the ecological/environmental side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastoralism, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies etc. British Marxist critic Raymond

Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature in 1973, The Country and the City, which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre and its habit of making the work of rural labour disappear even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.

Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy; that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature, and elevation of the former to moral predominance. Such anthropocentrism is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethology, Meeker asserts, shows that a \"comic mode\" of muddling through and \"making love not war\" has superior ecological value. In the later, \"second wave\" ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an ecophilosophical position with apparent scientific

sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams's ideological and historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.

As Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader,[page needed] “One indication of the disunity of the early efforts is that these critics rarely cited one another’s work; they didn’t know that it existed…Each was a single voice howling in the wilderness.” Nevertheless, ecocriticism—unlike feminist and Marxist criticisms—failed to crystallize into a coherent movement in the late 1970s, and indeed only did so in the USA in the 1990s.[citation needed]

In the mid 1980s, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocritism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western

Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function. In 1990, at the University of Nevada, Reno, Glotfelty became the first person to hold an academic position as a professor of Literature and the Environment, and UNR has retained the position it established at that time as the intellectual home of ecocriticism even as ASLE has burgeoned into an organization with thousands of members in the US alone. From the late 1990s, new branches of ASLE and affiliated organizations were started in the UK, Japan, Korea,

Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ), India (OSLE-India}, Taiwan, Canada and Europe.

[edit] Definition

In comparison with other 'political' forms of criticism, there has been relatively little dispute about the moral and philosophical aims of ecocriticism, although its scope has broadened rapidly from nature writing, Romantic poetry, and canonical literature to take in film, TV, theatre, animal stories, architectures, scientific narratives and an extraordinary range of literary texts. At the same time, ecocriticism has borrowed methodologies and theoretically-informed approaches liberally from other fields of literary, social and scientific study.

Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that

\"ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment\" (xviii), and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the \"undervalued genre of nature writing\" (xxxi). Lawrence Buell defines “‘ecocriticism’ ... as [a] study of the relationship between

literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis” (430, n.20).

Simon Estok noted in 2001 that “ecocriticism has distinguished itself, debates notwithstanding, firstly by the ethical stand it takes, its commitment to the natural world as an important thing rather than simply as an object of thematic study, and, secondly, by its commitment to making connections” (“A Report Card on Ecocriticism” 220).

More recently, in an article that extends ecocriticism to Shakespearean studies, Estok argues that ecocriticism is more than “simply the study of Nature or natural things in literature; rather, it is any theory that is committed to effecting change by analyzing the function–thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise–of the natural environment, or aspects of it, represented in documents (literary or other) that contribute to material practices in material worlds” (“Shakespeare and Ecocriticism” 16-17). This echoes the functional approach of the cultural ecology branch of ecocriticism, which analyzes the analogies between ecosystems and imaginative texts and posits that such texts potentially have an ecological (regenerative, revitalizing) function in the cultural system (Zapf, \"Literary Ecology\"). As Michael P. Cohen has observed, “if you want to be an ecocritic, be prepared to explain what you do and be criticized, if not satirized.”

Certainly, Cohen adds his voice to such critique, noting that one of the problems of ecocriticism has been what he calls its “praise-song school” of criticism. All ecocritics share an environmentalist motivation of some sort, but whereas the majority are 'nature endorsing' (as Kate Soper puts it in \"What is Nature?\" (1998)), some are 'nature sceptical'. In part this entails a shared sense of the ways in which 'nature' has been used to legitimise gender, sexual and racial norms (so homosexuality has been seen as 'unnatural', for example), but it also involves scepticism about the uses to which 'ecological' language is put in ecocriticism; it can also involve a critique of the ways cultural norms of nature and the environment contribute to environmental degradation. Greg Garrard has dubbed

'pastoral ecology' the notion that nature undisturbed is balanced and harmonious (\"Ecocriticism\" 56-58), while Dana Phillips has criticised the literary quality and scientific accuracy of nature writing in \"The Truth of Ecology\". Similarly, there has been a call to recognize the place of the Environmental Justice movement in redefining ecocritical discourse (see Buell, \"Toxic Discourse\").

In response to the question of what ecocriticism is or should be, Camilo Gomides has offered an operational definition that is both broad and discriminating: \"The field of enquiry that analyzes and promotes works of art which raise moral questions about human interactions with nature, while also motivating audiences to live within a limit that will be binding over generations\" (16). He tests it for a film (mal)adaptation about Amazonian deforestation. Implementing the Gomides definition, Joseph Henry Vogel makes the case that ecocriticism constitutes an \"economic school of thought\" as it engages audiences to debate issues of resource allocation that have no technical solution.

[edit] See also

• • •

Cultural ecology Critical theory Ecolinguistics

[edit] Sources

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (August 2011)

Barry, Peter. \"Ecocriticism\". Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.

3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of

American Culture. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Buell, Lawrence. \"Toxic Discourse.\" Critical Inquiry 24.3 (1998): 639-665 .

Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the

U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.

Cohen, Michael P. “Blues in Green: Ecocriticism Under Critique.” Environmental History 9. 1

(January 2004): 9-36.

Coupe, Lawrence, ed. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London:

Routledge, 2000.

Cranston, CA. & Robert Zeller, eds. \"The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers\".

New York: Rodopi, 2007.

Estok, Simon C. (2001). “A Report Card on Ecocriticism.” AUMLA 96 (November): 200-38.

Estok, Simon C. (2005). “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: An Analysis of ‘Home’ and ‘Power’ in

King Lear.” AUMLA 103 (May 2005): 15-41.

Forns-Broggi, Roberto. “La aventura perdida del ecopoema” in Fórnix 5/6 (2007): 376-394.

(Spanish)

Garrard, Greg, Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm (Eds). The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary

Ecology. Athens and London: University of Georgia, 1996.

Gomides, Camilo. 'Putting a New Definition of Ecocriticism to the Test: The Case of The Burning

Season, a film (mal)Adaptation\". ISLE 13.1 (2006): 13-23.

Heise, Ursula K. “Greening English: Recent Introductions to Ecocriticism.” Contemporary

Literature 47.2 (2006): 289–298.

Indian Journal of Ecocriticism[Full citation needed]

Kroeber, Karl. Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind. New

York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1964.

McKusick, James C. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. New York: St. Martin's, 2000.

Meeker, Joseph W. \"The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology.\" New York: Scribner's,

1972.

Moore, Bryan L. Ecology and Literature: Ecocentric Personification from Antiquity to the

Twenty-first Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the

Aesthetics of the Infinite. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1959.

Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003.

Rueckert, William. \"Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.\" Iowa Review 9.1

(1978): 71-86.

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[edit] External links

• Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment • Journal of Ecocriticism

• Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment • Indian Journal of Ecocriticism • Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism • OSLE-India

• Canadian Poetry: Documents/Studies/Reviews, No. 55 (Fall/Winter 2004): Ecocriticism and Contemporary Canadian Poetry

• \"Dinnseanchas\", Eamonn Wall, Berfrois, 17 March 2011 • \"GIECO: Grupo de Investigación en Ecocrítica\"