Hello Friends,
This blog is my response to the task assigned to us by our Prof. Dr.DilipSir in thinking activity on Marxist, Ecocritical, Feminist and Queer Criticism. So read, understand, learn and enjoy. Happy Learning!
ECOCRITISM
"Simply defined, ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment." Cheryll Glotfelty
Examples of Ecocriticism
Traditional form of Japanese poetry, known as haiku, focuses on one brief moment in time, employing a provocative colourful imagery, with a sudden moment of enlightenment and illumination.
An old silent pond…
A frog jumps into the pond, splash!
Silence again.
-Matsuo Basho
These haiku poetry are a fragment of the writer’s thought in awareness and attention wrapped in a moment of silence and pause. It makes one think over on important issues with a calming effect of that of a summer breeze.
Ramanujan’s distress for the unsung river which dries every summer is very poignant yet significant. He calls the river poetic with an abundance of water and flow only once a year before the natural reservoirs dry up due to human apathy and mindlessness of throwing away all sorts of garbage in it without giving a second thought to its pollution and other ill effects.
☆ Consider, for instance, what we can call the 'outdoor environment' as a series of adjoining and overlapping areas which move gradually from nature to culture, along the following lines: Area one: 'the wilderness' (e.g. deserts, oceans, uninhabited continents) Area two: 'the scenic sublime' (e.g. forests, lakes, mountains, cliffs, waterfalls) Area three: 'the countryside' (e.g. hills, fields, woods) Area four: 'the domestic picturesque' (e.g. parks, gardens, lanes) As we move mentally through these areas, it is clear that we move from pretty well 'pure' nature in the first to what is predominantly 'culture' in the fourth.
☆ Ecocriticism is the study of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary point of view, where literature scholars analyze texts that illustrate environmental concerns and examine the various ways literature treats the subject of nature. It takes an interdisciplinary point of view by analyzing the works of authors, researchers and poets in the context of environmental issues and nature. Some ecocritics brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation, though not all ecocritics agree on the purpose, methodology, or scope of ecocriticism.
In the United States, ecocriticism is often associated with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), which hosts a biennial conference for scholars who deal with environmental matters in literature and the environmental humanities in general. ASLE publishes a journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)—in which current international scholarship can be found.
Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including "green (cultural) studies", "ecopoetics", and "environmental literary criticism", and is often informed by other fields such as ecology, sustainable design, biopolitics, environmental history, environmentalism, and social ecology, among others.
QUEER THEORY
"and look, love, there are no poems to this only
triangles, scraps, prisons of purpled cloth
time begins with these gestures, this
sudden silence needs words instead of whispering
- Dionne Brand, "hard against the soul"
Yes, this sudden silence needs. Reaching across breaks with enjambment, these lines at once caress and rend open silence around desire between Caribbean women; and their publication in Trinidadian Canadian poet Dionne Brand's 1990 collection 'No Language is Neutral' marks a sea change in Caribbean women's literature. Hasn't Caribbean literature triumphantly arrived at the end of Brand's line, then - lavishing readers with words instead of whispering?
But telling the story in this way calls down a host of problems. On the one hand, it crafts a deceptively simple progress narrative that assumes that this storm of words means that "things are getting better" for women who love women in the Caribbean. In fact, Trinidadian writer Rosamond King - writing her reflections on one of the texts that initiated the boom, Makeda Silvera's classic essay "Man Royals and Sodomites: Some Thoughts on the Invisibility of Afro-Caribbean Lesbians" (1991) - speculates that the marginalization of Caribbean lesbians may have significantly increased in the past twenty years. And so perhaps the recent literary thunder writes back to new challenges rather than celebrating new gains. On the other hand, narrating Caribbean literature's move from silence to speech about desire between women suggests that these recent publications burst onto the literary scene out of nowhere, out of no Caribbean literary tradition - once again positing the region as being "behind" Europe and Euro-America in explorations of sexuality and gender. But there are centuries of representations of women's same-sex desire in the Caribbean, representations that don’t necessarily sound like those that emerge from the continents. Yes, there are poems to this, including Brand's; and there are triangles, scraps, sudden silences that also speak stormily of the complexities of fixing desire in language.
While Sappho's island became popular as the spatial signifier for female same-sex sexuality in 1870 and in Europe, in Caribbean islands other word stories circulated before and after that cultural formation.
Violent-haired, pure, honey-smiling Sappho
- Alkaios
Sappho and her island Lesbos are omnipresent in literature about women loving women, whatever the gender or sexual preference of the writer and whether or not Sappho and her island are explicitly named.
- Elaine Marks, "Lesbian Intertextuality"
● In "At Baia," a feminine speaker addresses an implicitly female other:
"Flower sent to flower;
for white hands, the lesser white,
less lovely of flower leaf,
or
Lover to lover, no kiss,
no touch, but forever and ever this. (Pg 385)
If the image of a flower suggests an intimate feminine caress, the poem denies physical closeness with "no kiss" and "no touch". The speaker mourns a total separation, "your hands/ (that never took mine)"
☆ Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of queer studies (often, formerly, gay and lesbian studies) and women's studies. The term can have various meanings depending upon its usage, but has broadly been associated with the study and theorisation of gender and sexual practices that exist outside of heterosexuality, and which challenge the notion that heterosexual desire is ‘normal’. Following social constructivist developments in sociology, queer theorists are often critical of essentialist views of sexuality and gender. Instead, they study those concepts as social and cultural phenomena, often through an analysis of the categories, binaries, and languages in which they are portrayed.
According to Jay Stewart, "Queer theory and politics necessarily celebrate transgression in the form of visible difference from norms. These 'Norms' are then exposed to be norms, not natures or inevitabilities. Gender and sexual identities are seen, in much of this work, to be demonstrably defiant definitions and configurations."
In an influential essay, Michael Warner argued that queerness is defined by what he called ‘heteronormativity'; those ideas, narratives and discourses which suggest that heterosexuality is the default, preferred, or normal mode of sexual orientation. Warner stated that while many thinkers had been theorising sexuality from a non-heterosexual perspective for perhaps a century, queerness represented a distinctive contribution to social theory for precisely this reason. Lauren Berlant and Warner further developed these ideas in their seminal essay, "Sex in Public." Critics such as Edward Carpenter, Guy Hocquenghem and Jeffrey Weeks had emphasised what they called the ‘necessity of thinking about sexuality as a field of power, as a historical mode of personality, and as the site of an often critical utopian aim’. Whereas the terms 'homosexual', ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ which they used signified particular identities with stable referents (i.e to a certain cultural form, historical context, or political agenda whose meanings can be analysed sociologically), the word ‘queer’ is instead defined in relation to a range of practices, behaviours and issues that have meaning only in their shared contrast to categories which are alleged to be 'normal'. Such a focus highlights the indebtedness of queer theory to the concept of normalisation found in the sociology of deviance, particularly through the work of Michel Foucault, who studied the normalisation of heterosexuality in his work The History of Sexuality.
Because this definition of queerness does not have a fixed reference point, Judith Butler has described the subject of queer theory as a site of ‘collective contestation’. They suggest that ‘queer’ as a term should never be ‘fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage and in the direction of urgent and expanding political purposes’. While proponents argue that this flexibility allows for the constant readjustment of queer theory to accommodate the experiences of people who face marginalisation and discrimination on account of their sexuality and gender, critics allege that such a 'subjectless critique', as it is often called, runs the risk of abstracting cultural forms from their social structure, political organization, and historical context, reducing social theory to a mere 'textual idealism'.
1. Barry, Peter. Beginning theory: An introduction to literary and cultural theory. 4th ed., Manchester UP, 2017.
2. McCallum, E. L., and Mikko Tuhkanen. The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature. Cambridge UP, 2014.