{"id":2426,"date":"2014-08-10T10:06:06","date_gmt":"2014-08-10T17:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/live-ehc-english-ucsb-edu-v01.pantheonsite.io\/?page_id=2426"},"modified":"2014-08-10T10:30:29","modified_gmt":"2014-08-10T17:30:29","slug":"what-is-the-future-of-ecocriticism","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ehc.english.ucsb.edu\/?page_id=2426","title":{"rendered":"What is the future of ecocriticism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is the future of ecocriticism?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section>
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n 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois presciently suggested that \u201cthe problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.\u201d\u00a0 With a nod to Du Bois, Lawrence Buell opened his 2005 book on\u00a0The Future of Environmental Criticism<\/em>\u00a0by suggesting that, although issues of race are sadly still with us, our emerging global environmental crisis will be the greatest problem of the coming century.\u00a0 As Buell is, sadly, very likely correct, environmental criticism will be crucially important in the 21st century, and will no doubt experience many \u201cwaves\u201d of interest.\u00a0 Because concern over our environmental crisis is in large measure fueling this interest, it seems likely that future ecocriticism will move in the direction second-wave critics are now charting, rather than looking back in a sentimental way to overly romanticized accounts of the environment.\u00a0 Similarly, ecocritical approaches that do not take into account issues of environmental justice (or more accurately, injustice) will no doubt seem simplistic and perhaps even worrisome.\u00a0 In addition, critics such as\u00a0Robert Watson<\/a>\u00a0will likely continue to theoretically explore the nature of the art that deals with nature.\u00a0 Moreover, as Watson makes clear on the first page of his\u00a0Back to Nature<\/em>, \u201cecocriticism seems to be booming in its test markets (British Romanticism and the literature of the American West) and now seems ready to push its way back to the Renaissance,\u201d as well as into all other periods of literary study.<\/p>\n

It is also likely that ecocriticism will greatly enrich other critical approaches.\u00a0 For example, in his Introduction to Albert Memmi\u2019s\u00a0The Colonizer and the Colonized<\/em>, Jean-Paul Sartre made a famous speculation: \u201cWere the colonized to disappear so would colonization\u2013with the colonizer.\u201d\u00a0 By this Sartre meant that if colonized human beings were to disappear, \u201cthere would be no more subproletariat, no more over-exploitation.\u201d\u00a0 While this is certainly true, Sartre ignored the fact that not only human beings are colonized, but so are the places they inhabit.\u00a0 Indeed, the colonial enterprise usually understood the \u201ccolonized\u201d as both people and place.\u00a0 True, in some instances it would be the human colonized resources that would appeal most to the colonizer, with the prospect of labor so inexpensive that literally thousands of hours of human labor could be lavished in the making of a single wool rug or bolt of silk fabric.\u00a0 On the other hand, the colonized natural resources, which in this case supply the wool and silk, also had immense appeal to the colonizer.\u00a0 By drawing attention to the fact that places as well as people are colonized, an ecocritical approach reveals that Sartre is not only being simplistic, but like many twentieth-century thinkers, he is unfortunately largely oblivious to environmental issues.<\/p>\n

Because of the environmental justice movement, ecocriticism greatly benefited from the work of literary critics exploring issues like gender, class, race, and colonialism.\u00a0 Ecocritics are now returning (and will very likely in the future continue to return) the favor by showing how an environmental approach can enrich critical work in the fields, such a colonial studies, from which environmental justice borrowed.\u00a0 In this sense, ecocriticism will, like the methodological approaches that preceded it, both remain a discrete field of literary study, as well as inform other approaches.\u00a0 Consequently, many critical studies will have a \u201cgreen\u201d tint to them without being primarily works of ecocriticism.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/p><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>
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English Overview<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Undergraduate<\/span><\/p>\n

General<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Specialization<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Honors<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Graduate<\/span><\/p>\n

General<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Colloquium<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Qualifying Exam<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

FAQs<\/span><\/p>\n

What is ecocriticism?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

What is 1st- and 2nd-wave ecocriticism?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

What is the environmental justice movement?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Which works qualify as ecocriticism?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Is ecocriticism new?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Do ecocritics only work with modern texts?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

What is anthropocentricism and ecocentrism?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Is ecocriticism\u00a0a form of activism?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

What is the future of ecocriticism?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-2426","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ehc.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ehc.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ehc.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ehc.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ehc.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2426"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ehc.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2448,"href":"https:\/\/ehc.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2426\/revisions\/2448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ehc.english.ucsb.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}