英文文學與文化教學資料庫

Nature vs. Culture
Nature''s relationship with humans and religions

--Ecological approach vs. poststructuralist approach

Nature-god-humans - language
The relationship between nature and culture is not one way. . . . Culture constructs the prism from which we know nature. We begin to internalize this prism from the moment we learn to speak; . . .
Nature . . . is indeed a cultural and, above all, a linguistic construct. The physical reality of air, water, fire, rock, plants, animals, soils ecosystems, solar systems etc., to which I speak of ''the natural world,'' nonetheless precedes and exceeds whatever words might say about it. It is this insistence on the ultimate precedence of nature vis-a-vis culture, which signals the ecocritical move beyond the so-called ''linguistic turn'' perpetuated within structuralism and poststructuralism. For some ecocritics, this precedence extends to a consideration of the ways in which human languages, cultures and textual constructs are themselves conditioned by the natural environment.( p.154)

Nature vs. Culture

--It might be countered that at a time when there is allegedly no place on earth that has not been affected in some way by humanity''s alteration of the natural environment, the precedence of nature has now become questionable. It is, however, precisely the imperilment of the biosphere wrought by that alteration which impels the ecocritical reinstatement of the referent as a matter of legitimate concern.
. . . All human making, including the largely unintentional remaking (or rather, undoing) of the earth''s ecosystems, remains dependent upon physical processes which precede and exceed human knowledge and power. All human being, meanwhile, remains interwoven, albeit often invisibly, with the life of countless non-human beings, who continue as best they can to pursue their own ends in the midst of an increasingly anthropocentric environment.

TOP

Texts

Classical Texts of nature writing:

Henry David Thoreau -- "Walden";

Aldo Leopold -- "A Sand County Almanac";

Annie Dillard -- "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek."

Rachel Carson --"The Sea Around Us," a gracefully written exposition of all that was known about the ocean environment in her time.

Edward Abbey, who wrote of western U. S. environmental issues with passion and style.

Work Re-Interpreted from Ecocritical Perspectives:

-- The poet Robert Frost, whose literature is grounded in the New England landscape; (Ref. Grant)

-- Bate . . . rereads Byron''s apocalyptic poem ''Darkness'' (1861), together with Keats''s idyllic ode ''To Autumn'' (1819), against meteorological records for the places and time periods in which these texts were written. Pitting himself against the literary critical convention of reading apocalyptic writing such as Byron''s either intertextually, with reference to other apocalyptic writing, or as a product of imagination bearing a largely metaphoric relation to the world beyond the page, Bate explores what happens if Byron''s image of a darkened earth is taken literally. This leads him to the discovery that the highly inclement weather conditions described by Byron in his letters of the time, and confirmed by the meterological records, can be traced to the eruption in 1815 of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia. This huge eruption caused an estimated 80,000 deaths locally, and lowered global temperatures for three years, leading to failed harvests, food riots and increased respiratory problems as far away as Europe. . . .Read in this meterological context, ''To Autumn'' also appears in a different light. Keats''s pastoral idyll was written in the autumn following the first good summer since 1815, at a time when clear air and warm weather was especially important to its consumptive author. Far from being an escapist fantasy, this is in Bate''s view a valuable ''meditation on how human culture can only function through links and reciprocal relations with nature.'' (1996: 440)

TOP

Other Possible Texts:

Gerard Manley Hopkins''s poem "Pied Beauty"quot;

References