scholarly journals “I Am the Eternal Green Man”: Holistic Ecology in Reading Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 466-479
Author(s):  
Aliona Yarova
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Education ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mind Set ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
Child Reader ◽  
Yew Tree

Abstract Holistic ecology considers nature and society as a whole, viewing humans and the environment as interdependent and interconnected. This article takes the lens of holistic ecology to examine the representation of human–nature relationships in Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls (2011) and explores how the novel guides the child reader to an environmental mind-set beyond overt didacticism. The article focuses on two aspects of the bond between the magical tree and the human characters in the novel: how the powerful tree empowers humans and how the human characters contribute to the tree’s expressions of power. The eternal Green Man—as the tree introduces itself—embodies this bond by being simultaneously tree-like and human-like, a complex merger of “the Green” (nature) and “the Man” (humanity). The monster-tree fulfils several powerful and empowering roles, such as monster and storyteller, destructive force and powerful healer, savage and philosopher, nightmare and escape. Importantly, it always keeps the shape of a yew tree. As such, A Monster Calls can contribute to children’s environmental education by illustrating the connection between the natural environment and humans: the eternal bond between “the Green” and “the Man.”

scholarly journals Saving the Environment: Environmental Lessons in Colin Thiele’s February Dragon

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 935-941
Author(s):  
Burhanuddin Arafah ◽  
Herawaty Abbas ◽  
Nurul Hikmah
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Education ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the relationship between humans and nature in February Dragon and elaborates on the environmental lessons conveyed in Colin Thiele's February Dragon. This article utilizes the concept of ecocriticism by Glotfelty. Ecocriticism explains human-nature interconnectedness. The portrayal of human-nature relation reveals several values of environmental education that readers, both children, and adults, could learn. Three environmental lessons such as respect, responsibility, and empathy towards other living beings were found in the story. Based on the elaborations, the characters in the novel show their respect, responsibility, and empathy towards other species by protecting the animal and the environment from bushfire’s dangers.

Extinction and Progress in Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850)

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Social System ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Natural Ecosystems

Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850), written a decade before the publication of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, emphasizes newly-emerging definitions of nature and modern perceptions of the interrelations between the human social system and the ecosystem. In so doing, the modern conceptions of the natural environment which the novel highlights, shape a utopian model for a more democratic society. As this paper points out, by using environmental metaphors, Kingsley questions human nature and the potential of the environment to change it. As a result, his depiction of natural ecosystems, though charged with ideology and the weight of conservative discourse, is progressive, inviting humans to change society—and themselves in the process.

Reflecting on place: environmental education as decolonisation

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 239-249
Author(s):  
Simone Thornton ◽  
Mary Graham ◽  
Gilbert Burgh
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Education ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Important Link ◽  
A Site

AbstractWe argue that to face climate change, all education, from kindergarten to tertiary, needs to be underpinned by environmental education. Moreover, as a site of reframing, education when coupled with philosophy is a possible site of influencing societal reframing in order to re-examine our relations to nature or our natural environment. However, we contend that as philosophy has been largely absent from curricula, it is vital to redress this issue. Further, the environment cannot be viewed simply as subject matter for study but, reconceptualised in the Indigenous sense as Place. Only in this way can we overcome the human-nature divide. We conclude that educators must look for what Plumwood calls ‘experiences that do not fit the dominant story’ to disrupt an important link in the chain of climate change by developing ‘traitorous identities’ able to challenge the dominant culture.

scholarly journals Ecological Aesthetic Implications of the Image of “White Deer” in The Plain of White Dear

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang Jun ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Magic Realism ◽  
Ancestor Worship ◽  
Epic Novel ◽  
Chen Zhongshi ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
Hero Worship

The Plain of White Deer is an epic novel written by Chen Zhongshi based on Chinese folk mythology and traditional customs and with the Western magic realism creation method. The image of “white deer” in the novel, a regional symbol of Bai Lu Yuan, implies the mythological consciousness of nature worship, deity worship, ancestor worship and hero worship, and embodies the ecological aesthetic concept of harmony and unity among human, nature, and society. This paper focuses on the mythological worship consciousness implied in the image of “white deer”, and tries to explore its internal ecological aesthetic implications.

La Bête humaine

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Émile Zola
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
The Future

Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the dark recesses of the human beast? La Bete humaine (1890), is one of Zola’s most violent and explicit works. On one level a tale of murder, passion and possession, it is also a compassionate study of individuals derailed by atavistic forces beyond their control. Zola considered this his ‘most finely worked’ novel, and in it he powerfully evokes life at the end of the Second Empire in France, where society seemed to be hurtling into the future like the new locomotives and railways it was building. While expressing the hope that human nature evolves through education and gradually frees itself of the burden of inherited evil, he is constantly reminding us that under the veneer of technological progress there remains, always, the beast within. This new translation captures Zola's fast-paced yet deliberately dispassionate style, while the introduction and detailed notes place the novel in its social, historical, and literary context.

Fielding and Richardson

PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
William Park
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
General Type ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.author of Charlotte SummersRather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.

LITTLE BUILDERS: CORAL INSECTS, MISSIONARY CULTURE, AND THE VICTORIAN CHILD

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 223-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Elleray
Keyword(s):  
South Pacific ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Pacific Island ◽  
The South ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Coral Island ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
Child Reader

In his Preface to R. M. Ballantyne's most famous novel, J. M. Barrie writes that “[t]o be born is to be wrecked on an island,” and so the British boy “wonder[s] how other flotsam and jetsam have made the best of it in the same circumstances. He wants a guide: in short, The Coral Island” (v). While for Barrie the island is a convenient shorthand for masculine self-actualization, the question pursued here is the relevance of a coral island, or more specifically the coral that forms the island, to the child reader. Published in 1857 and widely recommended for boys in the latter half of the nineteenth century, The Coral Island presents three boys, shipwrecked in the South Pacific, who in the first half of the novel demonstrate their resourcefulness in forming an idyllic community. Their pre-lapsarian paradise is then disrupted, first by Pacific Island cannibals and then by European pirates, the juxtaposition implicitly presenting civility as a quality that must be actively maintained by the European reader, rather than assumed as inherent in ethnicity. The second half of the novel sees the boy narrator, and eventually all the boys, implicated in key Western activities in the South Pacific: piracy, trade, and missionary activity. The latter is important to Ballantyne, a staunch Christian himself, and is focused through the historical phenomenon of Pacific Island “teachers,” that is, converted Pacific Islanders who preceded or accompanied European missionaries in the effort to spread Christianity across the South Pacific. The missionary work highlighted in the novel, as this essay will show, is also integrally connected to the coral featured prominently in its title.

scholarly journals The researching of diagnostic’s systems area as the reflection-ontological basis of cognition

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 10-14
Author(s):  
Elena N. Pesotskaya ◽  
Vera I. Inchina ◽  
Mikhail V. Zorkin ◽  
Svetlana V. Aksenova
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Cognitive Model ◽  
Diagnostic System ◽  
Basic Component ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Diagnostic Systems ◽  
Multi Level ◽  
Nature And Society

The concept of a diagnostic system is defined as a basic component of diagnostics, which is a multivariate knowledge of features of personality reflection. Multi-level of communications in the field of diphase procedural interaction of the formed diagnostic systems is proposed to be practically investigated on the basis of a synergistic cognitive model. In the structure of the diagnostic system itself, the phases of procedural interaction are distinguished, where the first one passes before diagnosis and outside its value-reflexive processes, forming against the background of a specific society and system of its medicine as a whole. The second phase involves the activities of a specific professional. The openness of this integrity stems from the phenomenal characteristics of the nature of social systems, the inclusion of individuals and their synergy. The significance of the parametric aspect of communication in complex intersubjective interactions, including network interactions, which influence the transformation of both human nature and society by the type of mutual determination of any nonlinear actions inherent in them initially, is shown.

scholarly journals Communication through Performance: Hausa Performance Art

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-81
Author(s):  
R Lawal
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
World View ◽  
Signalling System ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
Performance Arts ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
Universal Themes

The human voice is a natural instrument with a natural capability. Thus, speech with the aid of performance and music has been combined since earliest times to communicate valuable insights into human nature and universal themes of life. Such themes include life, death, good and evil. This paper examined performance as a signalling system in communication and how it is deployed by a creative artist. Furthermore, the paper also examined Hausa performance arts. It was discovered that just like in any other nation or community, Hausa performances reflect the socio-geographical experiences of the Hausa people, their natural environment and how they express their world view and artistic aspirations.

scholarly journals Fables as Media of Environmental Education for Sentani Children in Jayapura Regency, Papua

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 237
Author(s):  
Wigati Yektiningtyas ◽  
Evalina Silalahi
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Education ◽  
Key Words ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Elderly People ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Cultural Approach ◽  
Innovative Materials ◽  
Well Data

Abstract: Fable is one of Sentani verbal folklore that was passed down by parents to children to teach morals. One of them is about the importance of preserving environment. Nowadays, unfortunately, fable is not frequently told anymore. Children and even most Sentani people do not recognize it.  From long observation, Sentani children do not pay attention much to the nature as well.  Data of fables were obtained from some informants, i.e. tribal chiefs (ondofolo, khote) and elderly people in East Sentani  (Ayapo, Waena, and Asei Island) and Central Sentani (Sentani and Ifale) in  2017-2018. By adopting socio-cultural approach, this paper aims to discuss about (1) the natural environment of Sentani people, (2) the use of fables in environmental education for children. This study found that (1) fable is  creative and innovative materials in teaching children about environment: nature, fauna, and flora that can be  done informally, nonformally, and formally, (2) children have emotional ties with the fables and want to learn more, and (3)  it is  an alternative way of revitalizing Sentani fables and disseminating the socio-cultural values embedded in them. This study is benefecial to motivate Sentani children  to learn more about their ancestor’s heritages, love their environment,  and be proud of their identity. Key words: fable, environment, Sentani folklore, revitalizationAbstrak: Fabel merupakan salah satu folklor verbal Sentani yang dahulu dituturkan secara oral dari para orang tua ke anak-anak untuk menyampaikan berbagai ajaran moral. Salah satunya adalah tentang pentingnya merawat lingkungan. Saat ini, fabel sudah jarang dituturkan lagi. Anak-anak bahkan sebagian orang Sentani tidak mengenalinya.  Melalui pengamatan yang cukup lama, anak-anak Sentani kini tidak lagi memperhatikan lingkungan hidup mereka. Data fabel dikumpulkan dari para informan, yaitu para pemangku adat (ondofolo, khote) dan para tua-tua adat di Sentani Timur  (Ayapo, Waena, dan Pulau Asei) dan  Sentani  Tengah (Sentani dan Ifale) pada 2017-2018. Dengan menggunakan pendekatan sosial-budaya, paper ini bertujuan untuk membahas (1) lingkungan alam masyarakat Sentani dan (2) penggunaan fabel dalam pendidikan lingkungan bagi anak-anak. Studi ini menemukan bahwa (1) fabel merupakan materi yang kreatif dan inovatif untuk mengajarkan anak-anak tentang lingkungan: alam, fauna, dan flora yang dapat dilakukan secara informal,  nonformal, dan  formal, (2) anak-anak mempunyai hubungan emosi dengan fabel yang dipelajarinya dan ingin belajar lebih banyak fabel, (3)  penggunaan fabel sebagai pengajaran merupakan cara alternatif dalam merevitalisasi dan diseminasi fabel  Sentani dan nilai sosial-budaya yang terdapat di dalamnya. Studi ini bermanfaat untuk memotivasi anak-anak Sentani untuk terus mempelajari dan mencintai pusaka budaya leluhur mereka, mencintai lingkungan hidup mereka,  dan bangga akan indentitas mereka.   Kata kunci: fabel, lingkungan,  folklor  Sentani, revitalisasi

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