The tendency to stage appreciation for and attention to nature as a passive, guiltless enterprise was necessary for eighteenth-century colonial claims to space, but it also remains a very deeply entrenched aspect of environmentalist attitudes today. Indeed, innovations that shaped the technological interpretation and inscription of place in the latter eighteenth century have strongly situated contemporary North American environmental discourses.<p>This thesis explores the methods of spatial representation in Samuel Hearnes <i>A Journey from Prince of Waless Fort, in Hudsons Bay, to the Northern Ocean</i>(1795) and William Bartrams <i>Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, The Cherokee Country, The Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws</i> (1792). Both ecocritical and postcolonial methods underlay an analysis of the discourses and rhetorics of space exhibited in the North American travel writing of these two late-eighteenth-century writers. A first move monitors how landscape accrues not only as a product of descriptive techniques, frames, and screens, but also as a process whereby narrative identity is formed against and within a represented landscape. A second move locates these texts as versions of Mary Louise Pratts anti-conquest, in which the hero-explorer of colonial encounter is staged as both passive and innocent.<p>Two primary results from this research into the relationship between literature and environment are reported. First, according to conventions of ecocritical analysis, Hearne and Bartram implement two very different modes of spatial representation in travel narratives from the same period; in the broadest strokes, Hearnes text is deeply anthropocentric and only partially engages in eighteenth-century vogues of natural history, while Bartrams is compellingly and precociously ecocentric as well as deeply invested in the commerce of Linnaean systemizations of nature that revolutionized natural history in the period. Second, this disparity in representational method is correlated not only with variances in the ecological (or green) sensibilities of the authors, but also with distinctions in the colonial functionality of the texts, verifying that literature of place, despite the putative object of description, always already maintains significant valencies in social registers.

The essay explores a new way of interpreting the role of setting in Jane Eyre arguing that nature does not only provide a pretty backdrop for the story. The theoretical approach used in the study is ecocriticism, an earth-centered method. This approach is juxtaposed with a traditional linear analysis of setting in Jane Eyre. The essay is structured along two main lines. In the first part I challenge the traditional linear approach to setting and in the second I show that Jane Eyre is intertwined with nature from the very start. Lawrence Buell’s theory of place, in particular, is used to demonstrate that Eyre is not necessarily a lost soul. By contrast, the many descriptions of nature in the novel imply that her character is so entwined with setting that she could be at home wherever life may take her.

This thesis addresses the question posed to ecocriticism by Dana Phillips in his iconoclastic The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America: “What is the truth of ecology, insofar as this truth is addressed by literature and art?” by examining how ecocriticism has, or has failed to, contextualize ecocritical discourse within an ecological framework. After reviewing the current state of ecocriticism and its relationship with environmentalism, the thesis suggests that both rely on the same outmoded, inaccurate and essentially inutile ecological concepts and language, and argues for a new approach to ecocriticism that borrows its concepts and language from the geophilosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The thesis concludes with a reassessment of the work of Barry Lopez, showing how his fiction, when viewed through the lens of geophilosophy, does not support essentialist notions of nature, but rather works to articulate a world of multiplicities, and new modes of becoming.

Nature is everywhere. Every day we have contact with it. Still, many of us do not realize how important it is for our survival. Descriptions of nature have always been present in novels. However, recently the aspect of nature in literature, as well as in other disciplines, has been dealt with in a slightly different way. As a result, an ecocritical approach to literature has been favoured. This essay shows nature's impact on the characters in Jane Urquhart's The Stone Carvers. Using this novel as an example, I start by studying how the concept of nature is often constructed through opposition. I then move on to show how stereotypical boundaries between nature and human beings may be challenged. Finally I study how nature function as a healing agent in The Stone Carvers. In my studies I combine the theories of ecocriticism with a psychoanalytical perspective through the concept of abjection.

The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate the possibility to communicate messagesrelated to sustainable development through cultural works. Culture is here synonymous toliterature or, more specifically, the fiction genre. According to ecocritical research, this genrehas the capacity to contribute to a more sustainable development and is therefore interestingto analyse from an environmental point of view.The novel selected for the study is Vips så blev det liv - eller en hyllning till blågrönalgen(2010), written by the Swedish author Bob Hansson. The analysis is mainly focused on howthe book’s climate related messages are formulated and integrated in the story. Alsoconsidered is in what way Hansson’s strategies are compatible with the expectations raisedtowards the fiction genre within the context of sustainable development; expectations thatinclude the ability to evoke emotion, to convey new values and perspectives, and to act as alink between different parts of society.One conclusion to be drawn from the analysis is that Hansson approaches the climate issuein several ways. For example, Vips så blev det liv reflects both anthropocentric and bio-/ecocentric values, and the messages are delivered in an informative as well as in anillustrative manner. Moreover, the literary tropes give the book an emotional touch, whichmay help the reader to comprehend the information. In other words, the methods used are to alarge extent in line with the above mentioned expectations towards the fiction genre.What is however important to remember, is that the book includes several parallel themesand many comic episodes. For that reason, it cannot be taken for granted that the reader willpay much attention to the climate messages; however emotional, multidisciplinary andunconventional they may be. This highlights the difficulty in predicting the response to acertain cultural work. In order to understand its true potential in terms of communicatingmessages for a sustainable development, it is therefore essential to analyse the whole chainthat links the creator of the work to its recipients.

The modern city is the cradle of human activity, and through it humankind has both the ability to strip the planet of life and the ability to create thriving social and ecological systems. Strategic and interactive urbanisms that nurture multifarious ways of being in the world need to be formulated to save the natural world from ecological disaster. This paper traces the genealogy of the city from the unexplored wilderness to the to the conflux of technology and nature on city streets. Following the work of Neil Smith and William Cronon, this paper finds the roots of the urban system in the social construction of nature. Considering Martin Heidegger’s thoughts on technology along with David Harvey’s analysis of the urban system, it argues that city-building is a technē, an art which allows humankind to be at home with the world. As a part of this project, an interactive web application for gathering images and stories about urban spaces was created to provide a tool for citizen urbanism. The application, The Department of Civic Images, engages people in a dialogical urbanism that encourages citizens to see their environment as an intricate and valuable life network.

The tendency to stage appreciation for and attention to nature as a passive, guiltless enterprise was necessary for eighteenth-century colonial claims to space, but it also remains a very deeply entrenched aspect of environmentalist attitudes today. Indeed, innovations that shaped the technological interpretation and inscription of place in the latter eighteenth century have strongly situated contemporary North American environmental discourses.<p>This thesis explores the methods of spatial representation in Samuel Hearnes <i>A Journey from Prince of Waless Fort, in Hudsons Bay, to the Northern Ocean</i>(1795) and William Bartrams <i>Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, The Cherokee Country, The Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws</i> (1792). Both ecocritical and postcolonial methods underlay an analysis of the discourses and rhetorics of space exhibited in the North American travel writing of these two late-eighteenth-century writers. A first move monitors how landscape accrues not only as a product of descriptive techniques, frames, and screens, but also as a process whereby narrative identity is formed against and within a represented landscape. A second move locates these texts as versions of Mary Louise Pratts anti-conquest, in which the hero-explorer of colonial encounter is staged as both passive and innocent.<p>Two primary results from this research into the relationship between literature and environment are reported. First, according to conventions of ecocritical analysis, Hearne and Bartram implement two very different modes of spatial representation in travel narratives from the same period; in the broadest strokes, Hearnes text is deeply anthropocentric and only partially engages in eighteenth-century vogues of natural history, while Bartrams is compellingly and precociously ecocentric as well as deeply invested in the commerce of Linnaean systemizations of nature that revolutionized natural history in the period. Second, this disparity in representational method is correlated not only with variances in the ecological (or green) sensibilities of the authors, but also with distinctions in the colonial functionality of the texts, verifying that literature of place, despite the putative object of description, always already maintains significant valencies in social registers.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2008. / "May, 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-212). Library also has microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [2009]. 1 microfilm reel ; 35 mm. Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Using the "Great Chain of Being" -- which was integral to the Elizabethan understanding of the world -- as a starting point, this dissertation examines the sometimes startling ways in which Shakespeare's plays invert this all-encompassing hierarchy. At times, plants come to the forefront as the essential life form that others should emulate to achieve a kind of utopian ideal. Still other times, the soil and rocks themselves become the logical extension of a desire to remove man from the pinnacle of earthly creation. Over the course of this project, I explore plays that emphasize a) alternative, non-mammalian modes of propagation, b) the desire to sink the human body into the earth (or, at a minimum, man's closeness to the ground), and c) the imagined lives of flora and fauna, while underscoring man's kinship with myriad organisms. In many of the works explored, a modern vision of materiality comes to the forefront, presenting a stark contrast to the deeply held religious views of the day. In flipping the ladder upside down, Shakespeare entices his reader to confront inherent weaknesses in human and animal biology, and ultimately to question why man cannot seek a better model from the lowly ground upon which he treads.

E.E. Cummings' modernist poetry roots itself in nature. That it has not received overt ecosemiotic ("ecocritical") attention is surprising. This thesis reads Cummings' poetic oeuvre as found in his Complete Poems (1994) with a view to its ecological (whole, naturally interpenetrating) scope and dynamics. It builds upon existing criticism of Cummings' natural view and nature poetry (Norman Friedman). Although it mainly adheres to a close reading of the poems themselves, it also makes use of secondary sources such as Cummings' prose, notes, painting, and letters, in support of the ecological argument. It also draws from a broad basis of sources including various strands of ecological discourse: especially "ecocriticism" (William Howarth) as well as cultural ecology, deep ecology, and -- on an interdisciplinary basis -- ecology proper (Michael Begon). The thesis incorporates texts on modernist orientalism (Eric Hayot) since it argues that Cummings' ecology and his unique version of Taoism radically inform one another. Because relatively few sources exist that relate modernist poetry to nature (Robert Langbaum) the thesis consults a variety of modernist criticisms (Jewel Spears Brooker) with a view to the relations between the modernist sign and its outside natural context. Drawing upon sources further a field (Umberto Eco) the thesis offers a theoretical overview of the complication of natural context in the modem mindset as found in mainstream modernist discourse, structuralism (A.J. Greimas), and post-structuralism (Jacques Derrida). Amounting to a "semiotic fallacy", such a broad semiotic complication of sign-nature relations accentuates the importance of Cummings' poetry which remains at once modern and deeply connected to nature. Against this broad background, and in exploration of a zone of between-ness -- between opposites such as culture versus nature and East versus West -- Cummings' poetry is read hermeneutically to infer its various ecological dynamics. The main questions that the thesis examines are: What is the scope of Cummings' poetic ecology? What are its dynamics? How did critics respond to it? What reciprocal light does it shed on the poetic ecologies of the mainstream modernist poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound? The thesis demonstrates that the extent of Cummings' poetic ecology is considerable: it involves his various poetic categories (such as lyricism, satire, and visual-verbal poems) from early to late in his career, as well as a gradual Taoist crisis in his development (more or less from the 1930s to the 1950s). A sequence of ecological dynamics from Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching are applied to Cummings' poetry, including humility (smallness and earthiness), flexibility (an osmotic semiosis), serendipity (or synchronicity), a singular ideogrammatic style (Nina Hellerstein), iconicity (Michael Webster), an open-ended cross-stitching of oppositional expectations, and "flow" or signs that open out contextualizing possibilities faster than the reader can close them down. As the thesis further shows, these dynamics ultimately centre on Cummings' third dimension or voice beyond static and entrenched opposites of the relational and oppositional mind. The exploration concludes with a concise examination of additional instances of the third voice such as a yin tendency (restoration of femaleness), followed by an ecosemiotic analysis of two key ecological poems, the leaf poem (“l(a”) and the hummingbird poem (“I/ never"). The latter acts as an osmotic mandala that carries the modernist sign into active and complete earth, with the reader acting as the creative and collaborating intermediary. The focus then shifts to the critical reception of this poetic ecology, and finds that influential critics (R.P. Blackmur) tended to misappropriate it as a form of non-intellectuality. For example, Cummings' ecological flexibility was perceived as childish sentimentality. The boundaries of Cummings' poetry were perceived not to be "hardened" or "objective" enough. These receptions were based on a particular mainstream modernist view of the intellect, informed by Eliot's objectified and ambivalent early stance. Due to this, critics tended to overlook or dismiss that central value of Cummings' poetry -- its ecology -- in favour of a more predominant and dualistic alienation from and even cynicism towards natural integrity. These in-depth revisitations reveal that Cummings' major minor status embodies an ecological achievement: his poetry managed to move between and beyond the overall dualistic mainstream modernist ecological dilemma that is marked by the major versus minor categorization. Based on this thorough exploration of the elusive ecological dynamism of Cummings' poetry and its critical reception, the thesis turns its focus to Eliot's and Pound's poetry. The early, major works such as The Waste Land (1922) are read from the perspective of Cummings' poetic ecology, informed by the knowledge that a deep-seated double-ness towards ecology would be expected in these major works. An analysis of the mainstream modernist objectification of the sign with its concomitant and sealed-off alienation from its outside context and nature follows - the focus is on selected texts such as "Prufrock", "Tradition and the Individual Talent", and the Cantos. Eliot's and Pound's respective searches for and achievements of a third voice are subsequently examined, as found (for example) in the DA sequence of The Waste Land, 'The Idea of a Christian Society", the Four Quartets, Cathay, and the "Pisan Cantos". Centring on this prevalent and underemphasized third voice, the thesis posits an ecological reconfiguration of Cummings', Eliot's, and Pound's respective modernist projects. It demonstrates that Cummings' poetic ecology is central to the other two poets in terms of this voice. In provisional conclusion the thesis calls for a critical shift towards a more intense engagement with "smaller" modernist poetries such as Cummings', with a view to an increasing understanding of the ubiquitous, complex, and sometimes complicating "green" layer of the modernist poetic palimpsest. / Thesis (Ph.D. (English))--Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, 2003.