Ecocriticism: literary studies in an age of environmental crisis

Author(s):  
Cheryll Glotfelty
2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
Nguyet Thi Anh Tran

According to Cheryll Glotfelty, ecocritisim, simply put, is the study of the relationship between literature and physical environment. Ecocritisim argues the ecological theories of human sciences, which adopt "anthropocentrism" to propose the “earthcentrered” approach to literary studies. This paper focuses on the desire to “read” short stories by Nguyen Ngoc Tu through the eyes of core ideas of ecocritism. From this angle, the writer posed in a direct way environmental issues and human life destiny in the age of environmental crisis. Simultaneously, she brought out to discussion a way to listen to the voice of nature to find the answers to the crisis of modern humans. She also proposed an attitude: Human should live in balance with nature for peace and happiness.


Author(s):  
Hanjo Berressem

Providing a comprehensive reading of Deleuzian philosophy, Gilles Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy argues that this philosophy’s most consistent conceptual spine and figure of thought is its inherent luminism. When Deleuze notes in Cinema 1 that ‘the plane of immanence is entirely made up of light’, he ties this philosophical luminism directly to the notion of the complementarity of the photon in its aspects of both particle and wave. Engaging, in chronological order, the whole body and range of Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, the book traces the ‘line of light’ that runs through Deleuze’s work, and it considers the implications of Deleuze’s luminism for the fields of literary studies, historical studies, the visual arts and cinema studies. It contours Deleuze’s luminism both against recent studies that promote a ‘dark Deleuze’ and against the prevalent view that Deleuzian philosophy is a philosophy of difference. Instead, it argues, it is a philosophy of the complementarity of difference and diversity, considered as two reciprocally determining fields that are, in Deleuze’s view, formally distinct but ontologically one. The book, which is the companion volume toFélix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology, argues that the ‘real projective plane’ is the ‘surface of thought’ of Deleuze’s philosophical luminism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-66
Author(s):  
Julie Bates

Happy Days is contemporaneous with a number of seminal contributions to the concept of the everyday in postwar France. This essay suggests that the increasingly constrained verbal and physical routines performed by its protagonist Winnie constitute a portrait of the everyday, and goes on to trace the affinities between Beckett's portrait and several formulations of the concept, with particular emphasis on the pronounced gendering of the everyday in many of these theories. The essay suggests the aerial bombings of the Second World War and methods of torture during the Algerian War as potential influences for Beckett's play, and draws a comparison with Marlen Haushofer's 1963 novel The Wall, which reimagines the Romantic myth of The Last Man as The Last Woman. It is significant, however, that the cataclysmic event that precedes the events of Happy Days remains unnamed. This lack of specificity, I suggest, is constitutive of the menace of the play, and has ensured that the political as well as aesthetic power of Happy Days has not dated. Indeed, the everyday of its sentinel figure posted in a blighted landscape continues to articulate the fears of audiences, for whom the play may resonate today as a staging of twenty-first century anxiety about environmental crisis. The essay concludes that in Happy Days we encounter an isolated female protagonist who contrives from scant material resources and habitual bodily rhythms a shelter within a hostile environment, who generates, in other words, an everyday despite the shattering of the social and temporal framework that conventionally underpin its formation. Beckett's play in this way demonstrates the political as well as aesthetic power of the everyday in a time of crisis.


2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 101-108
Author(s):  
John Vogler
Keyword(s):  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document