Sunday, March 15, 2015
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Where Literature meets Environment
I find it very odd that today, more than ever, an ecological consciousness is not more widespread. What I mean by widespread is not so much that more people talk about it, or write about it, but that it be more pervasive in everyday life and work. That it be integrated into the daily exegesis of life.
I feel this point needs more discussion than it seems to merit. When we do talk about something as being socially relevant, thanks to operational differences of discourse, they become ghettoized and enveloped in a jargon that only makes sense to specialists. While this is inevitable, this does not have to be all there is to the study of the environment. Apart from technical knowledge, it is imperative that we build other strengths to understand the circumstances under which we labour with such truths, and that entails a scrutiny on a more fundamental level: language.
This opens yet another can of worms. Indeed, in this introduction, it seems like I've hit upon a Matroshka doll like structure.
What is the relationship of representation with ecology? There are primarily four ways in which the environment has been represented: the scientific jargon which seeks to classify and subsume the environment under the rubric of instrumental positivism; Nature writing, in the vein of 'Walden'; Poetry, which tries to fight the opaqueness of language at arriving at truths not directly associated with human behaviour through a 'making difficult'; and fiction. This last bit has several sub-branches, and of the most potential is speculative fiction, which, in distancing itself from the individual, is allowed more freedom to talk about things which cater to human interest epistemologically.
But what is frustrating is, the dominating sentiment is one of either guilt/concern, or dismissal, and dismissal largely because of two things: the inevitability of an ecological catastrophe, and the seeming inefficacy of 'Nature'.
At the outset, I shall announce that it is not the purpose of this project to offer solutions, or proselytize, or even for that matter, undertake a novel wise summary of authors and how the environment was represented in their works. The purpose of this undertaking is rather, a study of the strengths of fictional, or poetic representation in arriving at a firmer incorporation of an ecological consciousness into social consciousness, while trying to extract it from the rhetoric of 'catastrophe', and 'activism'. I argue that these last two elements, while all important in arriving at a proper understanding of 21st century life, limits what, according to Heidegger, (although he used it in a different sense entirely), 'brings-forth' the truth if we 'become-with'.
I feel this point needs more discussion than it seems to merit. When we do talk about something as being socially relevant, thanks to operational differences of discourse, they become ghettoized and enveloped in a jargon that only makes sense to specialists. While this is inevitable, this does not have to be all there is to the study of the environment. Apart from technical knowledge, it is imperative that we build other strengths to understand the circumstances under which we labour with such truths, and that entails a scrutiny on a more fundamental level: language.
This opens yet another can of worms. Indeed, in this introduction, it seems like I've hit upon a Matroshka doll like structure.
What is the relationship of representation with ecology? There are primarily four ways in which the environment has been represented: the scientific jargon which seeks to classify and subsume the environment under the rubric of instrumental positivism; Nature writing, in the vein of 'Walden'; Poetry, which tries to fight the opaqueness of language at arriving at truths not directly associated with human behaviour through a 'making difficult'; and fiction. This last bit has several sub-branches, and of the most potential is speculative fiction, which, in distancing itself from the individual, is allowed more freedom to talk about things which cater to human interest epistemologically.
But what is frustrating is, the dominating sentiment is one of either guilt/concern, or dismissal, and dismissal largely because of two things: the inevitability of an ecological catastrophe, and the seeming inefficacy of 'Nature'.
At the outset, I shall announce that it is not the purpose of this project to offer solutions, or proselytize, or even for that matter, undertake a novel wise summary of authors and how the environment was represented in their works. The purpose of this undertaking is rather, a study of the strengths of fictional, or poetic representation in arriving at a firmer incorporation of an ecological consciousness into social consciousness, while trying to extract it from the rhetoric of 'catastrophe', and 'activism'. I argue that these last two elements, while all important in arriving at a proper understanding of 21st century life, limits what, according to Heidegger, (although he used it in a different sense entirely), 'brings-forth' the truth if we 'become-with'.
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