Chapter 10: Environmental Literary Studies Flashcards
Who said “Climate crisis is a failure of the imagination”?
Amitav Gosh (2016)
Who said “poetry can counter greed, narcissism, and blind destruction”?
Brenda Hillman (2015)
Who wrote The Defence of Poetry
- Percy Shelley
- the great instrument of moral good is imagination
Blockiada (Klein, 2015)
popular resistance to modernist development planning ex: Save Beeliar Wetlands (2017)
Who says “equating literature;s ability to change minds with social change is overenthusiastic”?
- Timothy Clark
- ideas dont cause change alone
Beautiful
- smooth, symmetrical, delicate, light, and familiar
- provokes feelings of peace, joy, and happiness
Sublime
- rough, rugged, massive, mysterious, and wild
- provokes feelings of awe, reverence, terror, and euphoria
Picturesque
- Landscape looks like a picture
- evokes the pleasure of contrasts and nature
- fairly regular with pleasing irregularity
CliFi
- climate fiction
- speculative narratives about what climate change is doing/may do to environments
British Romantic Period
- 1789-1832
- Initiated a new appreciation of nature in response to industrialization
- Set action in new worlds
- contrasts nature and urbanization
- Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
- Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal (Wordsworth, 1800)
- acceptance of the interconnected web of nature humans are embedded in
- like the rest of creation we are bodies that emerge from the earth and return to it
Pastoral (Garrard, 2012)
evokes an idealized European nature that is idyllic, peaceful, abundantly harmonious, and picturesque
Wilderness (Garrard, 2012)
- a place of exile, suffering, and evil
- untamed landscapes
Who says wilderness is a place of freedom where we can discover our true selves?
- William Cronon (1996)
- ultimate landscape of authenticity
- unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization
Apocolypse (Buell, 1995)
- suggest a titanic struggle between good and evil
- a prophetic warning to change our behavior before its too late
- the most powerful metaphor the contemporary environmental imagination has
Going Bush (Theodore Roosevelt)
- shedding civilizations false temptations to confront reality in its purest form
- 19th century adventurists and survivalists
How can we read environmental literature?
- ask what specific idea of nature is represented, where it came from, and how it shaped future thinking
- participate in the text’s imaginative work of constructing an environment
Thinking Complexity
looking for the reciprocal yet contradictory and unequal relations that sustain a system
Scale Framing (Heise, 2008)
- considering how small systems are always nestled within larger systems
- what is sustainable at one level may be unsustainable or immoral at another
Thinking Like A Mountain (Leopold, 1949)
A sound links each listener in a web of unequal relations (competing, predatory, symbiotic, and parasitic) that together encompases a whole (the mountain ecosystem) greater than the sum of its individual members `
Environmental Unconsciousness (Buell, 2009)
a knowledge of interconnectedness/coexistence suggested in a text
Eco Critcism
- aims to expose a text’s ecological thought which is often ignored, concealed, or repressed
- studies the relationship between literature and the physical environment
- John Muir founded the Sierra Club and persuaded Roosevelt to preserve Yosemite
- Wordsworth inspired UK’s Land Trust movement
-preservationism
Aldo Leopold
- animal ecologist
- Game Management (1933)
- A Sand Country Almanac (1949)
- ecological thinking should drive economics and ethics
- economic thinkers abuse land
Green Imperialism
- extending power over the biosphere
- the cataloging and reorganization of biota that accompanies all empires
