Ecocriticism is the youngest of the revisionist movements that have swept the humanities over the past few decades. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. – Environmental Humanities Center", "What is Ecocriticism? Mark Wigley, ‘Recycling Recycling,’ in Amerigo Marras (ed. Last edited on 14 September 2020, at 18:16, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, "What is ecocriticism? Impasses of the Post-Global (Open Humanities Press, forthcoming, 2011). Cheryll Glotfelty's working definition in The Ecocriticism Reader is that "ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment",[3] and one of the implicit goals of the approach is to recoup professional dignity for what Glotfelty calls the "undervalued genre of nature writing". To be fair, this was not Massey's aim in the paper, but such a paper would have noted the ways in which Fuller's popularization of cybernetic ecology made its way into the artistic field via writers such Jack Burnham and Gyorgy Kepes.

A decade has passed since Michael P. Cohen, in a widely read essay, took stock of our discipline and suggested that it urgently needed to broaden its perspective. 35, 2009, pp. Ecocriticism is the study of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature.
Fuller understood ecology (oikos: house) in terms of ‘planetary housekeeping’, a task that would take as its mandate the very biological survival of the human species and would thus transcend all partial interests in the name of a universal post-political community. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Verso: London, 2004), p. 151. [12] He tests it for a film adaptation about Amazonian deforestation. For an extension of Smithson's notion of ‘dialectical landscape’ to a site of contemporary politico-ecological conflict, see Yates McKee, ‘Wake, Vestige, Survival: Sustainability and The Politics of the Trace in Allora/Calzadilla's Landmark,’ October, Vol.

By default, then, ecology as a matter of artistic concern has long been associated with a uncritical naiveté and has until recently received little critical treatment outside of a fragmentary and episodic series of reviews and catalogue-essays.12 In its neglect of the vexed status of ecology in neo-avant-garde and postmodernist art, A Keener Vision misses an opportunity to begin rectifying this major historiographical problem. In a compensatory note regarding the dearth of post-war materials in the book, Braddock and Irschmer briefly mention Smithson one among other earth artists ‘for whom ‘environment’ has signified material, perceptual, or historical space largely devoid of ecological concerns’ (KP, 15-6).

[5], 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". Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. From the late seventies on, writers such as Lucy Lippard and John Beardsely have stepped in to fill this crticial void. While Massey notes Fuller's enthusiasm for technocratic principles of resource management, this does not seem to register as a problem for the author. [8], 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." Please check your email address / username and password and try again. 112–26. All of these essays draw on critical environmental history to decode the iconographic or ideological conventions of the works in question, but they largely remain caught on what Bruno Latour has diagnosed as the ‘shoals of the “social representation of nature”’ approach endemic to the humanities.3 Latour calls for a more expansive account of the ways in which cultural practices such as art come to participate in ‘sociotechnical networks’ wherein the ‘matters of fact’ produced by the sciences become ‘matters of concern’ for new publics and political constituencies. In part this entails a shared sense of the ways in which 'nature' has been used to legitimize 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. All rights reserved.
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. Greg Garrard has dubbed 'pastoral ecology' the notion that nature undisturbed is balanced and harmonious,[10] while Dana Phillips has criticised the literary quality and scientific accuracy of nature writing in "The Truth of Ecology". [7] 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. Literary criticism is thought to have existed as long as literature [citation needed].In the 4th century BC Aristotle wrote the Poetics, a typology and description of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art. Indeed, Massey ignores the voluminous literature that has emerged over the past fifteen years in magazines such as Grey Room concerning the dangers of an uncritical retrieval of what Felicity Scott has called Fuller's ‘technoutopian’ imaginary.4 Perhaps the most problematic aspect of Massey's essay is that he ends with a celebratory account of the work of Sir Norman Foster's ‘green architecture’, which pays homage to Fuller's innovations (geodesic principles, energy-efficiency, eco-friendly construction techniques).

As Braddock and Irmscher translate the IPCC's mandate, ‘human culture must now change dramatically and rapidly for life on earth as we know it to survive in some acceptable, sustainable form. Politics After Modernism (Cambridge: MIT, 2007) and Yates McKee, ‘The Public Sensoriums of Pulsa: Cybernetic Abstraction and the Biopolitics of Urban Survival,’ Art Journal, Vol. The book would also work beautifully in specialized courses in courses on environmental history, landscape studies, and–with certain qualifications to be discussed below–an emergent curriculum concerned with contemporary art and ecology. Some version of this question has long been posed by materialist historians ranging from Marx to Braudel to Lefebvre concerned with the dialectical ‘co-production’ of social practices and nonhuman environments. As Glotfelty noted in The Ecocriticism Reader, "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. In a concise axiom of US environmental history Miller writes, ‘the first federal headquarters in Yellowstone Park was a fort, complete with a gun turret’ (KP, 104). Nature is indifferent to any formal ideal […] but this does not mean one is helpless before nature, but rather that nature's conditions are unexpected’.8 Among the ‘unexpected’ conditions of nature was precisely its non-seperability from humanity, such that even the most apparently remote sites, processes and events already bear the trace of human involvement or interference. 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. ASLE publishes a journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)—in which current international scholarship can be found. Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 160. In this work, a rough grid of appropriated news-fragments depicting devastated industrial landscapes and contaminated habitats–arguably echoing the format of a pin-up landscape calendar–is overlaid with a faded, torn-out reproduction of an american eagle–a creature situated ambivalently between imperialist nationalism and ecological endangerment. Though the first several essays on topics such as colonial-era travel illustrations and the visual cultures of natural science are of interest, the core of the book's argument really starts with the entry by Angela Miller entitled ‘The Fate of Wilderness in American Landscape Art’.