Can Literature save ‘Nature’? An Eco-critical

Transcript:Can Literature save ‘Nature’? An Eco-critical:
Can Literature save ‘Nature’? An Eco-critical Research in Vijay Tendulkar’s Plays Rajeev Yadav, Assistant Professor-English, Indira Gandhi Government PG College, Bangarmau, Unnao. World increasingly lost to pollution, contamination and industry sponsored bio-disaster. A bio-social context of unrestrained capitalism, excessive exploitation of nature, worrying definitions and shapes of ‘development’ and environmental. A social-economical materialistic context of modern, advanced gadget-driven, techno-savvy society. Tend to committing ecocide. Making the planet inhospitable for any kind of life. Why Ecocriticism? Does ecological disaster require a theory to recognize pollution or to warn students of the dangers of that plastic wrapper or electromagnetic radiation? Does esoteric and text-oriented theory have any role to play in such context? What is the role of theory in a time and context that demands praxis? Ecocriticism originates in such a bio-social-political culturally awaken society. Questions we have to face: The study of the relationship between literature and the environment. A socio-political movement linked with activism. To see how theoretically informed readings of cultural texts can contribute not only to consciousness raising but also look into the politics of development and the construction of ‘nature’. To seek links between literary studies and environmental activism, between human and social sciences and environmental discourse. A resolutely interdisciplinary as embodied in its journal, “Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE).” What is Ecocriticism? “Ecocriticism is a critical mode that looks at the representation of nature and landscape in cultural texts paying particular attention to attitudes towards nature and the rhetoric employed when speaking about it.” It aligns itself with ecological activism and social theory with the assumption that the rhetoric of cultural texts reflects and informs material practices towards the environment while seeking to increase awareness about it and linking itself with other ecological sciences and approaches. nature-writing texts to add to the canon in literary and cultural studies, the role of place- physical, topographical and built in literature, environmental awareness in canonical texts, every period’s attitudes to non-human life and depiction of the human-non-human relationship in them, the subtexts of literary works that reveal anthropomorphic, patriarchal and capitalist attitudes towards the non-human, women, nature and landscape, the assumptions of rationality as superior and emotions as inferior and other such discourses within texts arguing that these beliefs lead to particular visions of the environment, a socio-political framework for reading literary and cultural texts, literary examples within social discourses and acts of development, Literary