"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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historic social conflicts. Language theory examines how words represent
human and nonhuman life. Criticism judges the quality and integrity of works and
promotes their dissemination. Each discipline stresses the relations of nature and
literature as shifting, moving shapes – a house in progress, perhaps, unfinished
and standing in a field. (ibid.)
For Howarth the aim of ecocriticism should be “to redirect humanistic ideology, not
spurning the natural sciences but using their ideas to sustain viable readings” (78).
My working definition of literary ecocriticism is the analysis of literature’s
expression of humanity’s place on Earth, our oikos or home. This implicitly includes the
cultural (through literature) and the biological (through the Earth as our ecosystem). Karl
Kroeber points to the importance of this intersection between the cultural and the
biological:
An ecologically oriented criticism directs itself to understanding persistent
romantic struggles to articulate meaningful human relations within the conditions
of a natural world in which transcendence is not an issue. Such criticism does not
dismiss the copious evidence of romantic claims that imaginative consciousness
fulfils, rather than contravenes, the dynamic tendencies of natural life.
Ecologically oriented criticism thus recognizes a foreshadowing of its own
understanding of humanity’s relation to nature in the romantic view that it is
natural for human beings to be self-conscious, and natural, therefore, to construct
their cultures out of complexly interassimilative engagements with their physical
and biological environment. Foreshadowings of this kind are valuable, because
they enable literary scholars to define with precision how their critical
presuppositions have differentially emerged from the cultural discourse of their
predecessors. (38-9)
The term ecocriticism is a contraction of ecological literary criticism. The
tendency to drop the reference to literature fudges the full ecological implication of the
discipline. Bate refers to literary ecocriticism (2000: 73) and I adopt this term. Kroeber
does not use the contraction, arguing that ecological literary criticism concentrates on
linkages between natural and cultural processes (1). He, like Howarth, points to the
linking function of literary ecocriticism between humanism and science and calls the
Romantic poets “proto-ecological” because they accepted “a natural environment
existent outside of one’s personal psyche” (19). They did this without a developed
knowledge of science because in the late 18 th Century there was “no biochemistry, let
alone molecular genetics” (19):
The romantic poets are of special interest to those of us concerned to develop an
ecologically oriented criticism exactly because they anticipate – sometimes
shrewdly, sometimes absurdly – attitudes and conceptions that only in our century