What is an ecologically imaginative text?

"What is so wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse."

E. M. Forster

Sources

Irving Thoreau DuBois Hemingway Faulkner Bishop Oates Williams

•Human history is implicated in natural history 1. The non-human environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history. H. Melville, Moby Dick E. M. Forster’s, Passage to India W. Faulkner’s, The Bear Sound and the Fury Peter Mathiessen, Killing Mr. Watson Marjorie K. Rawlin’s, The Yearling • Legitimizes non-human interests 2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest. Aldo Leopold’s, "Thinking Like Mountain." Annie Dillard’s, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

• Human accountability is to nature 3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation. Aldo Leopold’s, "Extension of Ethics" Karel Chapek’s, The War with the Newts

• Ecological processes are primarily dynamic 4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than a given is at least implicit in the text. Terry Tempest Williams', An Unspoken Hunger Michael Crichton’s, The Andromeda Strain Kurt Vonnegut’s, Galapagos or Cat’s Cradle Walt Whitman's, Leaves of Grass

Adapted from (Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination,)

By Dr. J. Siry;

Cross-disciplinary issues in Ecological Criticism and literary criticism

August

What is literature?

– Elizabeth Bishop [i] –the poetry of places.

– Robert Frost       Recitation [ii] as a way of knowing words & their meaning – Orson Welles

Expressing doubt in writing. Wahsington Irving, Sleepy Hollow

 Capturing a sense of loss in writing. Joyce Carol Oates, Against Nature

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Is Film an art as literature or drama is an art form? Hemingway, Big Two Hearted River

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (a play)

 Tom Stoppard, Arcadia (a play)

Faulkner's The Bear  

 Coming of Age in the rural South: Faulkner & Dubois' Black Folk.

 William Faulkner, The Bear

Thoreau, Faith in a Seed

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The New American voice http://web.rollins.edu/~jsiry/whitman.html

 Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself –“creeds in abeyance”

 Discovering sources of great literary expression: Ogden Nash poems

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Terry Tempest Williams, The Open Space of Democracy, pp. 1-107.

 A contemporary challenge: describing what we’ve tainted- Ground Truthing

The Open Space of Democracy, ENGAGEMENT

 The IRONY of bourgeois reality: excerpts Rachel Carson's, Silent Spring

Narratives, return to

Irving Thoreau DuBois Hemingway Faulkner Bishop Oates Williams

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