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The goal of this thesis is to examine the theme of community in two translated works, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease and Lake of Heaven, by Ishimure Michiko. I analyze how Ishimure defines a community, and I also look at the tension between insiders of the community with outsiders. Next, I look at Ishimure’s use of genre in Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow; she blends autofiction, autobiography, and illness narratives to give different perspectives to reflect on the Minamata disease health crisis. Through this analysis, I also look at the shift in Ishimure’s tone toward outsiders, moving from anger to reconciliation between the texts in question. Lastly, I comment on the change in Ishimure’s public image and discuss a story where she is the outsider experiencing Tokyo.

Ecocriticism is a field that examines the relationship between literature and the physical environment. As an emerging discipline, it is crucial to expand its contribution to reinforce the existing literature. A writer's creation of a literary world reflects their life and relationship to the outside world. In this context, the thesis provides an alternative perspective to prior studies that emphasize nature as a character within the narrative of literary works. The central research question guiding this investigation is: "What representations of nature do we find in The Christmas Oratorio and in Lake of Heaven? What is the human perception of and connection to nature in these books?" Employing qualitative content analysis, the study interprets and analyses excerpts from the chosen novels. The findings reveal that nature plays a significant role in the narrative of both works, exhibiting agency and profound interconnection with other characters. In The Christmas Oratorio, nature assumes the role of a character, intricately entwined with human experiences and emotions. Conversely, in Lake of Heaven, nature is imbued with a more spiritual essence, symbolizing the soul and closely linked to human perceptions and experiences. This thesis endeavours to address research gaps by exploring the intricate interplay between humans and nature, as depicted in the selected literary works. Readers can better comprehend the writers' consciousness in the relationship to nature by understanding how they depict this interaction.

Published in 1977, Wendell Berry's book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture gained widespread popularity. More than half a century later, many of the notions of the body and the earth presented in its seventh chapter, "The Body and the Earth," remain relevant and important for environmental discourse today. Berry's discussion of the body and the earth examines their mutuality and codependence from an ontological, theological, agricultural, and even biological perspective. The coupling of this text with Judith Butler's, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? contemporizes his argument through its more socio-political and philosophical claims regarding life and the body. Through the discussion of societal frames that often prescribe the value of life and bodies, Butler introduces the concept of precarity, or the imposition of violence and its resultant instability of the body. Driven by the external forces of society, precarity weakens, commodifies, and exploits the body, creating unsustainable social systems. As we learn from Berry, this bodily precarity parallels the violence and mistreatment of the earth. The body, and its ecological and anthropological interconnectedness, establishes both material and immaterial ties to the earth, suggesting that any damage done to the body affects not just itself, but the entire system. In bringing together Butler and Berry through an ecocritical dialogue, a new ethic regarding the formation and meaning of a life emerges, prompting revision of the current societal parameters that establish the definitions of the body and the earth. Berry's resurgent relevance comes from his admonitions to repair the relationships of all bodies and the networks of which they are a part. Thus, the connection between an individual and their body, other bodies, and the earth must be restored for an environmental ethic to both persist and establish productive environmental change.

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Dénaturer l’écocritique : une lecture de l’écologie queer de Timothy Morton propose de réfléchir l’écocritique à la lumière de l’écologie queer. Alors que l’écocritique s’intéresse aux traces de la « nature » dans les textes littéraires, les outils de la théorie queer permettent de faire apparaître le caractère artificiel de l’idée de nature. L’essai réfléchit à l’implication d’une écologie « sans nature » pour l’écocritique et propose la focalisation et l’ironie comme moyens d’approcher un texte selon une écocritique queer. Cochoncetés et autres nouvelles est une exploration littéraire de l’écologie queer sous différentes formes. Les personnages du recueil tissent des liens avec humains et non-humains, traversent des réseaux toujours ouverts, entrent en relation avec un temps, un espace, une matière ou un savoir qui les dépasse. / Dénaturer l’écocritique : une lecture de l’écologie queer de Timothy Morton proposes to reflect on ecocriticism in the light of queer ecology. While ecocriticism is interested in the traces of “nature” in literary texts, the tools of queer theory examine the idea of nature to reveal its artificiality. The essay reflects on the implication of an ecology “without nature” for ecocriticism and proposes focalization and irony as ways to approach a text through queer ecocriticism. Cochoncetés et autres nouvelles is a literary exploration of queer ecology in various shapes. The characters in the collection connect with humans and non-humans, pass through open networks, engage with a time, a space, a matter or a knowledge that expand beyond their reality.

My study utilizes ecocriticism, eco-Marxism, and posthumanism to discover how the sympathetic practices of both reading and ecology provide us with what I call an oiko-logic. Specifically, I read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing. In Gulliver’s Travels we see Gulliver as an ecological threat in every journey, and Swift says that this is because we forget ourselves and deliberately choose to not attune—sometimes even choosing destruction. For Swift, we bungle things no matter which system we try, and we create degenerative devolution despite the fact that we can help. Sterne’s fundamental ecological question is how people and the entities they dwell with (living and non-living) have real interactions—which means considering domestication’s bilateralism. Humans and animals can interact beneficently in Sterne’s work, and individualism becomes oiko-logically untenable since calculations of value and affordability must include others. In Moby-Dick the whale’s values are more moral than Ahab’s, and through comparisons available in the text of Moby-Dick we begin to see inside Melville’s eco-values to the impact of a heroic animal agency as Moby-Dick follows his values—while our conscience hangs in crooked corridors. In Butcher’s Crossing and representations of buffalo slaughter, correlative human-animal experiences of thirst, ferality, and slaughter are contrasted with western bison hunters on the plains and aliens in such a way that the alien is between humanity and itself. In oiko-logic, literature and ecology share a sympathetic practice similar to the Native American sensibility of Mitakuye Oyasin: “all my relations.”

This dissertation examines representations of the forest in Canadian and Brazilian literatures and cultural imaginaries in order to question utilitarian models of environmental use and discuss issues of deforestation in both countries. I argue that these models draw on aesthetic and narrative strategies that were consolidated through cultural myths about the Canadian woods and the Brazilian Amazon during the period of colonization and settlement which reified the wilderness and the jungle as uncultivated environments in need of being tamed, optimized, and civilized through consistent projects of land transformation and economic development. Furthermore, I argue that myths about the wilderness and the jungle founded a particular mode of knowing, interacting and existing in and against the environment based on the antagonism between humans and non-human nature which was imposed as universal and continues to shape current material practices in both countries. Despite the differences between the Canadian wilderness and the Brazilian jungle, similar patterns and problems are visible in the literatures of both countries because of their colonial histories and economic models based on the capitalist development of primary resources. Thus, by analyzing a variety of Canadian and Brazilian texts, my dissertation draws attention to the relations of power within which "the forest" was constructed in the Canadian and Brazilian national imaginaries, and which, in turn, were naturalized by particular representations of the wilderness and the jungle. In so doing, my project shows the centrality of Western-centric ideals of progress, culture, nature, and modernity in both countries, and how these concepts continue to inform current institutional policies and environmental debates about forestry management, deforestation, and conservation. I argue that by questioning utilitarian models of land management, writers like Brian Fawcett, Daphne Marlatt and Jeannette Armstrong in Canada as well as Márcio Souza, Regina Melo, and co-writers Bruce Albert and Davi Kopenawa in Brazil call for a critical reinterpretation of master narratives while also inviting alternative frameworks of knowledge that run against dominant economic, environmental, and ontological models. The Canadian wilderness and the Brazilian Amazon occupy a central role in the national literatures and cultural myths of these countries. Nevertheless, the idea of the wilderness and the jungle they reify is mostly symbolic and, as such, tends to obscure the material realities of these landscapes. In turn, the texts I analyze in this dissertation unveil a connection between the imaginary and actual forestry practices enacted by companies and governments to call for epistemic, ontological, and material changes on the ground. Put another way, these narratives mediate between real world issues and aesthetic form, and try to offer a discursive structure for acting upon current environmental, cultural, and economic crises. In their critique of the sustained exploitation of humans and non-humans in postcolonial nations like Canada and Brazil, the writers I examine in my project offer the seeds a theoretical (un)thinking that brings epistemology, ontology, nature, and politics to the forefront of discussions about the environment.

Föreliggande studie ämnade att undersöka om den utopiska dokumentärserien Down to Earth with Zac Efron, vars syfte är att inspirera till engagemang för klimatkrisen, förmedlar motsägelsefulla budskap i form av ojämlika maktförhållanden mellan människa och natur samt mellan människor. Tidigare studier på i huvudsak dystopisk miljöinriktad Hollywoodfilm, samt till viss del dokumentärer, har visat att dominanta förhållanden ofta förekommer. Det, liksom den växande debatten om populärkulturens potential i att förmedla kunskap om klimatkrisen och dess bidrag till formandet av samhälleliga attityder, klimatforskares betoning på vikten av social hållbarhet för att lösa den samt trenden med hoppfull klimatkommunikation motiverade behovet av studien. För att identifiera maktförhållanden över natur och människor tog analysen stöd från ekokritisk teori och intersektionalitetsteori. Med hjälp av verktyg från multimodal kritisk diskursanalys och filmanalys undersöktes meningsskapandet mellan text och bild på detaljnivå. Efter utförd analys av dokumentärseriens avsnitt Iceland och Costa Rica har ojämlika maktförhållanden gentemot natur och människor identifierats, med störst betoning på avsaknaden av socialekologiska perspektiv. Slutsatsen grundar sig i den amerikanisering som präglar innehållet, exkluderingen av underrepresenterade grupper och att huvudkaraktären Zac Efron, och delvis kollegan Darin Olien, gestaltas som stereotypa vita män. Även om ekocentriska tankesätt delvis är närvarande, bekräftade bristen på inkludering av social hållbarhet dokumentärseriens misslyckande som en effektiv kunskapskälla till förståelsen av klimatkrisens samtliga delar. / The following study aimed to investigate whether the utopian documentary series Down to Earth with Zac Efron, with the goal to inspire for commitment to the climate crisis, conveys contradictory messages in the form of unequal power relations between humans and nature as well as between people. Previous studies on mainly dystopian environmentally oriented Hollywood films, and to some extent documentaries, have shown that dominant relationships often occur. Together with the growing debate about the potential of popular culture in conveying knowledge about the climate crisis and its contribution to formation of societal attitudes, climate scientists’ emphasis on the importance of social sustainability to solve it and the trend of hopeful climate communication, the need for the study was motivated. In order to identify power relations over nature and people, the analysis was supported by ecocriticism and intersectionality theory. Using a multimodal critical discourse analysis and film analysis, the creation of meaning between text and image was examined at a detailed level. After an analysis of the episodes Iceland and Costa Rica, unequal power relations towards nature and people have been identified with the greatest emphasis on the lack of social ecological perspectives. The conclusion is based on the Americanization that characterizes the content, the exclusion of underrepresented groups and the portrayal of the main character Zac Efron, and partly his colleague Darin Olien, as stereotypical white men. Although ecocentric mindsets are partly present, the lack of inclusion of social sustainability confirms the failure of the documentary series as an effective source of knowledge for understanding all elements of the climate crisis.

The developing knowledge of life sciences is at the crux of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake as she examines human promise gone awry in a near-future dystopia. This thesis examines aspects of posthumanism, ecocriticism, and feminism in the novel's scientific, cultural, and environmental projections. Through the trope of extinction, Atwood's text foregrounds the effects of human exceptionalism and instrumentalism in relation to the natural world, and engenders an analysis of human identity through its biological and cultural aspects. Extinction thus serves as a metaphor for both human development and human excesses, redefining the idea of human within the context of vulnerable species. Oryx and Crake reveals humanity's organic connections with non-human others through interspecies gene-splicing and the ensuing hybridity. In this perspective, Atwood's text provides a dialogue on humankind's alienation from the natural world and synchronic connections to the animal other, and poses timely questions for twenty-first century consumerism, globalism, and humanist approaches to nature. The loss of balance provoked by the apocalyptic situation in Oryx and Crake challenges commonplace attitudes toward beneficial progress. This imbalance signals the need for a new narrative: A consilient reimagining of humanity's role on earth as an integrated organism rather than an intellectual singularity.