Books Shelved under “Environment and Literature”
Catalogue: Genesis of 'Ecocriticism'
You can read the first post here: Catalogue: Where to begin?
While the first post in the series delineated some books to give you an insight into the immediate and the real problems that our planet is facing (and, axiomatically we are facing as part of the same planet); this second post will list out a few proposals that attempted to define Ecocriticism. The following illustration would help you understand why one needs to be thoroughly informed about the ecocritical practices (or for that matter any other theoretical practice).
A student proposed a project which involved a biocentric application of the environmental ethic as an interpretive standard to a reading of Robert Frost’s poem “The Woodpile”. Having a lack of the actual contact with the real world and vaguely misconstruing the meanings of the words compiled in the poem, the student’s interpretation was that:
the poem’s narrator claims to know the inner thoughts of a small bird, Frost is an arrogant humanist. Because he admires the work of a wood-cutter, Frost is a flagrant utilitarian. In short, Frost’s poem is anthropocentric because it violates the integrity of ‘the environmental ethic’, it is an offensive text deserving deletion in a biocentrically reformed canon.
Keeping in mind these dangers of ill-informed application of theories, I chose the below works to give you an understanding of how Ecocriticism as a theoretical concept must be deployed. These works will also inform you the relevance of this discipline.
