The 'Cockroach' Waste and Wasted Life in World Literatures in English

In this essay I intend to pursue a comparative reading of three postcolonial texts – in their intertextual and counter-canonical relationship with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) – that deal with the ethics, but also the aesthetics, of the relationship between humans and animals. By doing so, and with the help of the Kafkian critical apparatuses, particularly Deleuze and Guattari’s critical contribution (1986), which will be the core of this study, I will also examine the nexus between literature and the environment, with particular emphasis on waste, also taking into consideration the paradigms of necropolitics (Mbembe 2003) and of écart (Jullien 2012). Kafka’s Curse (1997), by South African writer Achmat Dangor, Cockroach (2008) by Canadian-Lebanese Rawi Hage, and Blackass (2015) by Nigerian Igoni Barrett will be here analysed and scrutinised.

Theorising Urban Spaces in Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning (1998) and Without a Name (1994)

The study focuses on Yvonne Vera's Without a Name (1994) and Butterfly Burning (1998) and reveals that the re-organisation of the African landscape by the white colonisers had disastrous effects on the environment and this in turn affected the lives of the colonised in irrevocable ways. The study also contends that humanity cannot survive without the environment in whatever situation as it is embedded in the human psyche and influences human behaviours and experiences as revealed in Vera (1994) and (1998). Both novels look at city environments, the cities being colonial constructs that were meant to obliterate the “African” environment. The study is desktop qualitative research employing content analysis in the interpretation and analysis of the chosen texts (novels). The analysis was supported by evidence from other critical works (secondary sources) by various authors/critics. The theory which informs this study is Ecocriticism, basing on Glotfelty's (1996) definition of the term that it is the study of the relationship between literature and the environment. In the same vein, as illustrated in the study, Buell (2005) and Heise (2006) contend that that all literature is environmental, hence this study of the depiction of cityscapes in Vera's works. The study concludes that the re-organisation of the African environment by the colonisers had far-reaching results on both the landscape and the human psyche. It is, therefore, recommended that more studies analysing the impact of the re-organisation of the environment be done so as to map a strategic way in order to undo, rectify and reverse the negativity implanted and nurtured by the colonial environmental systemic practice and agenda.

L’oeuvre romanesque de Loys Masson, ou l’écocritique mauricienne et indianocéanique au moyen d’une poétisation de la nature et de l’espace

The study of Mauritian Literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary perspective arouses various concerns and questionings such as the protection of planet Earth, the relation between characterisation and natural settings, the nature-culture dichotomy and nature writing. The fictionalisation and poeticization of Mauritian and Indian Ocean islands’ natural spaces in Loys Masson’s novels depict both man as Nature’s saviour and Nature as man’s saviour, in such a way that Nature’s raison d’être becomes Literature and aesthetics. Nature exists because it will eventually turn into a Book. Born at the end of the 20th century in American universities and closely linked to geocriticism and ecopoetics, ecocriticism thus provides new insights into Masson’s novels while reviving traditional French philosophical thoughts by Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Michel Serres.

A Study of Wuthering Heights from the Perspective of Eco-Criticism

This research paper attempts to explore the novel, Wuthering Heights, through the lens of Eco criticism and it explores the relationship between human and nature in the novel. Literature can be perceived as an aesthetically and culturally constructed part of the environment, since it directly addresses the questions of human constructions, such as meaning, value, language, and imagination, which can, then, be linked to the problem of ecological consciousness that humans need to attain.Consciousness raising in environmental thinking, and the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas posed by the global ecological crisis. The task of ecocriticism, is to express a conceptual foundation for the study of interconnections between literature and the environment. Through An Eco criticism viewpoint the researcher would like to discuss about the emotional and physical of characters Get along nature as essential for building development-based novel of ecological self.

Affect, Emotion, and Ecocriticism

Our relationships to the environments that surround, sustain, and sometimes threaten us are fraught with emotion. And since, as neurologist Antonio Damasio has shown, cognition is directly linked to emotion, and emotion is linked to the feelings of the body, our physical environment influences not only how we feel, but also what we think. Importantly, this also holds true when we interact with artistic representations of such environments, as we find them in literature, film, and other media. For this reason, our emotions can take a rollercoaster ride when we read a book or watch a film. Typically, such emotions are evoked as we empathize with characters while also inhabiting emotionally the storyworlds that surround these characters and interact with them in various ways. Given this crucial interlinkage between environment, emotion, and environmental narrative in the widest sense, it is unsurprising that, from its inception, the study of literature and the environment has been interested in how ecologically oriented texts represent and provoke emotions in relation to the natural world. More recently, ecocritical scholars have started to develop a more sustained theoretical approach to exploring how affect and emotion function in environmentally oriented texts of all kinds. In this article, I will attempt to trace this development over time, briefly highlighting some of the most important texts and theoretical concepts in affective ecocriticism

AN ECOCRITICAL SURVEY OF GULZAR'S POETRY

Ecocriticism is a field of literary studies where literature may study from the perspective of the environment. The interdisciplinary relation between literature and the environment get developed in the ecocritical studies of literary texts. Nature is the fundamental element in this and so is focused centrally. Gulzar is an Indian poet who is famous for his use of nature and images to convey things. This paper aims to study the poetry of Indian Hindi-Urdu poet Gulzar through the lens of Ecocriticism. The paper attempts to establish the relation between environment and chosen poems

EKOKRITIK SASTRA DALAM PUISI TALANG DI LANGIT FALASTIN KARYA DHENI KURNIA

One of the literary works is poetry. Poetry can be a medium for poets to convey ideas, concepts and thoughts. One of these ideas and thoughts is based on the observations of the environment. It implies that poetry is also related to other fields of study. One of the fields of study that can be related to literary works is ecocriticism. Ecocritics is focused on the relationship between literature and the environment or how the relationship between humans and their physical world are reflected in literary works. In this study, the writer tries to analyze the poetry Talang di Langit Falastin written by Dheni Kurnia through the concept of echocritics as an analytical lens. The result of this study shows that Talang di Langit Falastin illustrates environmental exploitation and pollution caused by political and economic factors. This poem becomes interesting because the poet analogized Talang Mamak and Palestine which are equally oppressed, causing environmental destruction and exploitation. The destruction of the environment in Palestine was caused by the Zionist invaders who bombarded with bombs and nuclear weapons, while the environmental destruction in Talang Mamak was carried out by capitalists who burned forests to open the new land for economic interests that affected the misery of living things in the environment.

Mendes, Victor K., and Patrícia Vieira, editors. Portuguese Literature and the Environment. Lexington, 2019

Portuguese Literature and the Environment, edited by Victor K. Mendes and Patrícia Vieira, is a groundbreaking collection that contributes significantly to our understanding of Portuguese environmental literary studies.