Thinking Activity : Ecocriticism & Feminist

Hello Readers ; 

                    In this blog I want to discuss about Eco-criticism . Let's see ,

 What is Eco-criticism ?

         Eco-criticism 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. 

Eco-criticism was a term coined in the late 1970s by combining “criticism” with a shortened form of “ecology”—the science that investigates the interrelations of all forms of plant and animal life with each other and with their physical habitats. Eco-criticism is the study of the relationship between literature and nature.

👉Definition:

Lawrence Buell- " ecocriticism ... as a study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis .

What Eco-critics Do ? 

 1. They re-read major literary works from an ecocentric perspective, with particular attention to the representation of the natural world. 

2. They extend the applicability of a range of ecocentric concepts, using them of things other than the natural world -concepts such as growth and energy, balance and imbalance, symbiosis and mutuality, and sustainable or unsustainable uses of energy and resources. 

3. They give special canonical emphasis to writers who foreground nature as a major part of their subject matter, such as the American transcendentalists, the British Romantics, the poetry of John Clare, the work of Thomas Hardy and the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century. 

4. They extend the range of literary-critical practice by placing a new emphasis on relevant 'factual' writing, especially reflective topographical material such as essays, travel writing, memoirs, and regional literature. 

5. They turn away from the 'social constructivism' and 'linguistic determinism' of dominant literary theories (with their emphasis on the linguistic and social constructedness of the external world) and instead emphasise ecocentric values of meticulous observation, collective ethical responsibility, and the claims of the world beyond ourselves. 

Example : 

.The Future of Environmental Criticism by .Lawrence Buell. ...

.Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau. ...

.Ecology Without Nature by Timothy Morton. ...

.Politics of Nature by Bruno Latour. ...

.Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.

       

           the river has water enough

           to be poetic about

           only once a year

           and then it carries away…

                                   -A.K. Ramanujan

Ramanujan’s distress for the unsung river which dries every summer is very poignant yet significant. He calls the river poetic with an abundance of water and flow only once a year before the natural reservoirs dry up due to human apathy and mindlessness of throwing away all sorts of garbage in it without giving a second thought to its pollution and other ill effects.

Whereas traditional form of Japanese poetry, known as haiku, focuses on one brief moment in time, employing a provocative colourful imagery, with a sudden moment of enlightenment and illumination.

   :The Future of Environmental Criticism :

    The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Written by one of the world's leading theorists in ecocriticism, this manifesto provides a critical summary of the ecocritical movement. A critical summary of the emerging discipline of “ecocriticism”.

                         : Feminism :

Here , I want to discuss about Feminism.

What is Feminism ?

Feminism is an interdisciplinary approach to issues of equality and equity based on gender, gender expression, gender identity, sex, and sexuality as understood through social theories and political activism. Historically, feminism has evolved from the critical examination of inequality between the sexes to a more nuanced focus on the social and performative constructions of gender and sexuality. 

Definition :

According to Merriam-Webster, it’s “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” and “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.

 Feminism incorporates the position that societies prioritize the male point of view, and that women are treated unjustly within those societies. Efforts to change that include fighting against gender stereotypes and establishing educational, professional, and interpersonal opportunities and outcomes for women that are equal to those for men.

Key Concerns of Feminism (M.H.Abrams):

1.The basic view is that Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal

2.It is widely held that while one’s sex as a man or woman is determined by anatomy, the prevailing concepts of gender

3. The further claim is that this patriarchal (or “masculinist,” or “androcentric”) ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionally considered great literature

4.gynocriticism—that is, a criticism which concerns itself with developing a specifically female framework for dealing with works written by women, in all aspects of their production, motivation, analysis, and interpretation, and in all literary forms, including journals and letters.

5.One concern of gynocritics is to identify distinctively feminine subject matters in literature written by women—the world of domesticity, for example, or the special experiences of gestation, giving birth, and nurturing, or mother-daughter and woman-woman relations—in which personal and affectional issues, and not external activism, are the primary interest. 

6.Another concern is to uncover in literary history a female tradition, incorporated in subcommunities of women writers who were aware of, emulated, and found support in earlier women writers, and who in turn provide models and emotional support to their own readers and successors. 

7.A third undertaking is to show that there is a distinctive feminine mode of experience, or “subjectivity,” in thinking, feeling, valuing, and perceiving oneself and the outer world. Related to this is the attempt (thus far, without much agreement about details) to specify the traits of a “woman’s language,” or distinctively feminine style of speech and writing, in sentence structure, types of relations between the elements of a discourse, and characteristic figures of speech and imagery. 

Example :

               A Room of One's Own

         A Room of One's Own is actually two lectures given by Virginia Woolf in October, 1928 at two women’s constituent Colleges of Cambridge University. She later enlarged these two lectures and published them together as a full length essay in September, 1929. In the present essay, Woolf talks on women writers and their literature, but she further developed it into the issue of women inequality, especially as it restricts women to create new works. She played crucial role for the development of the feminist movement. Actually feminism is a literary theory which suggests that a woman should have the same social and economic rights as that of a man. The present essay can be read as a manifesto of feminist movement.

                        Thank you