Ecocriticism: The Newest School of Literary Criticism

Students of literature all know about the different schools of criticism. Most people, however, outside the field hear of “literary criticism” and think that this is the act of reading a piece of literature to say that it is bad or that the writer is ignorant. Not otherwise. In short, criticism is simply the analysis of literature, basically to pursue meaning. Different schools (or methods, if you will) of literary criticism offer different approaches or perspectives to doing this.

In fact, most people would understand the feminist criticism. For many, many years, the canon has been confined to male writers, and there has been criticism from male critics that you wear a picture. Around the 1970s, feminist criticism took off, and those critics were already traversing centuries of literature and reading it through a feminist lens.

Now, in the last two decades, there has certainly been a new school of literary criticism on the rise – eco-criticism, and it serves to solve the role that the environment has taken in the creation and perspective of literature. with which it is read.

The Society for the Study of Literature and the Environment boasts great articles that discuss how this mode of criticism works and how it develops. In an article published on the ASLE website, “Wild Things: Forgetting Deconstruction – Today’s Literary Critics Are Green Today”, author Gregory McNamee writes that the strategy in this realm is now very powerful in the construction of a literary canon in which ecocriticism is the most important literary work compose with respect to the environment Some include Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, Mary Austin’s Land of Rain, Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge and besides the list are other expected works by authors such as Thoreau , and of course Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Other ecocriticisms actually attempt to examine the role that plays in the environment of literature before popular pieces. Often an ecocritic will treat the environment as a character in a text. Or rather, as explained by an article published by John Hopkins;

“Interaction with nature is imperative, for ecocritics do not invoke the pastoral blue of the sky or the sublime, at least not in terms of transcendental escapism. But, like Clarke, they argue for the inter-relationship of all factors within the ecosystem, from the social and political to the phenomena of the natural world.”

Like other schools of literary criticism that consider the “Other”, such as feminism, gender-studies, Marxism, ecocriticism is an act of action. In the aforesaid fragment of John Hopkin’s book by Jonathan Bate, in Songs of the Earth. In it, Bate writes about ecology and “the language of our earth habitat”. /a> he has taken from Heidegger), the place from which we have become divorced, then literature can return to us. “It takes guts to do what literature can do.”