Ecocriticism

Ecocriticism ( rare: Ökokritik ) is an interdisciplinary approach that has emerged in the literature, and examines the literary texts relating to ecological aspects. It has emerged in the United States since the 1970s and has been the publication of The Ecocriticism Reader (ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 1995) and by Laurence Buell's The Environmental Imagination (1996 ) one of the most productive and fastest growing branches of become international literature. In Europe, he has established no later than the foundation of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment in 2004 ( see Gersdorf / Mayer 2005, 2006).

Definition

The term is probably to William Rückert Essay: back, which was first published in 1978 "Literature and Ecology An Experiment in Ecocriticism ." Another pioneer work is Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival (1974 ), which introduces the idea of anthropocentrism as a central argument of Ecocriticism: The ecological crisis, as Meeker was, due to the separation of nature and culture, and the consequent devaluation of nature, which has been characterized in the Western world.

According to a recent definition by Simon C. Estok to Ecocriticism is characterized on the one hand by its ethical commitment to the primary importance of the natural environment from the other by its commitment to connecting and complexity of the preferred organizational principles of natural and cultural processes ( Estok 2001: 220).

In Germany, a strong cultural ecological variant of Ecocriticism has established. With reference to precursors such as Gregory Bateson (1973) and Peter Finke ( 1995) in particular Hubert Zapf developed a model of " literature as a cultural ecology" that shows not only analogies between literary texts and ecological structures, but in addition, as an ecological literature ( regenerative, revitalizing ) force in the cultural system considered ( Zapf 2002, 2008).