New & Other Directions

Literature and NatureUniversity of Helsinki/ Comparative Literature 25.11.2014

Apocalypse, End of TimeBook of Revelation

Greek; Apokálypsis; literally ”lifting of the veil"

Enviromental Imagination and Apocalypticism

• Thomas Malthus => Population growth and limited resources • Paul Erlich: The

Population Bomb (1972)• Deep Ecology• From Judeo-Christian

to secular context

In contemporary fiction and culture • Buell (1995) ”[…] in

the era of Cat’s Cradle, Dr. Strangelove, and Star Wars it is hard for apocalypticism to keep a straight face”• Don De Lillo: White

Noise (1984)• Margaret Atwood:

Oryx and Crake (2003)

Criticism?• Malthus’s theory not

scientifically valid• Media uses

environmental catastrophes as narratives for its own ends• Leads to dogmatic

thinking, ”ecofascism”?

• Locus Classicus; Joseph Conrad The Heart of Darkness• Edgar Allan Poe:

Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym• J. M. Coetzee: Life of

Michael K.• Yan Martel: Life of Pi

Postcolonialism and Ecocriticism – Texts and Study

Feminism and Ecology – Carolyn Merchant (s.1936)

• The Death of Nature (1980) => From Renaissance ”female earth” and holistic cosmology to Scientific Revolution• Reinventing Eden (2003)

=> Judeo-Christian tradition has seen nature as female=> Narratives structure our view of nature

WILLIAM FAULKNERModernism and Nature

”The Bear”; Go Down Moses (1942)

• A collection of short stories or a novel?• ”The Bear” –

Protagonist Isaac ”Ike” McCaslin• Hunting and ritual –

”Old Ben”• Vanishing wilderness –

Plantation economy and deforestation

• (Evans 1999; Palmer 2002)

Other themes in Faulkner • Topography, sense of

place• Legacy of slavery, blood

inheritence (Light In August; Go Down Moses etc)• Sexuality, woman’s

position in the South (The Wild Palms; Absalom, Absalom; The Hamlet)

• (Faulkner and the Natural World, University Press of Mississippi 1999)

Postmodernism – Margaret Atwood

• Surfacing (1971), on surface a Bildunsroman of a young woman• The impossibility of

depicting nature• A fish or ”the idea of

a fish”?• (Blomberg & Säntti 2008)

New directions for study and research

• Science fiction, fantasy, utopias and dystopias• Children’s literature• Ecocritical

Shakespeare• Cross-disciplinary

research

Thank You For the Course and Good Luck with the Exam!