Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :The Environmental Imagination
Historically, artistic representations of the natural environment have served as agents of both provocation and compartmentalization, calling us to think ecocentrically but often conspiring with the readerly temptation to cordon off scenery into pretty ghettoes. We honor their achievements best when we recognize them as prophetic but intermittent efforts to rise above the cultural limitations that threaten to becloud them. Their achievements are mirrors of both cultural promise and of cultural failure.
If, as environmental philosophers contend, western metaphysics and ethics need revision before we can address today's environmental problems then environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends upon finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity's relationship to it. To that end, it behooves us to look searchingly to the most searching works of environmental reflection that the world's most technological power has produced; for in these we may expect to find disclosed (not always with full self-consciousness of course) both the pathologies that bedevil society at large and some of the alternative paths it might consider.
Here, we've got another quote from an awesome (though a bit opaque) primary text written by an Ecocritic: Mr. Lawrence Buell. And this quote offers us a cautionary tale.
It tells us: Dear readers of literature, you're being tempted. But don't give in. Don't analyze the environment in literature as just window dressing, as just an aesthetic pleasure that's beyond the reaches of our daily, technology-driven experiences.
Instead, Buell wants us to think of nature as a major player in literature. So, for example, consider the way our thinking about animal-human interactions might be changed by doing a close reading of Moby-Dick. In this book, Melville exposed something about human nature that many find troubling.
He showed us that humans don't treat other creatures very well. Sometimes, we get kind of obsessed and crazy about annihilating other animals. And, by raising awareness about this fact through fiction, Melville's book likely contributed to the subsequent ban on whaling.
And after doing all that fancy schmancy literary analysis, it's clear that Buell wants us to refocus on eco-activism. He wants us to consider just how that rift between humans and nature happened, and how we can stop being so nature-sick.