Essays on ecocriticism

Ecocriticism as an academic discipline began in earnest in the s, although its roots go back to the late s. Because it is a new area of study, scholars are still engaged in defining the scope and aims of the subject. An Experiment in Ecocriticism. While ecocritics study literature written throughout history and analyze its relationship to the environment, most scholarship has focused on American and British literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Early life[ edit ] Born in the suburbs of New York City, Abram began practicing sleight-of-hand magic during his high school years in Baldwin, Long Island; it was this craft that sparked his ongoing fascination with perception.

Inhe began working as "house magician" at Alice's Restaurant in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and soon was performing at clubs throughout New England while studying at Wesleyan University.

After his second year of college, Abram took a year off to travel as an itinerant street magician through Europe and the Middle East; toward the end of that journey, in London, he began exploring the application Essays on ecocriticism sleight-of-hand magic to psychotherapy under the guidance of R.

After graduating summa cum laude from Wesleyan Essays on ecocriticismAbram traveled throughout Southeast Asia as an itinerant magician, living and studying with traditional, indigenous magic practitioners or medicine persons in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Nepal.

Upon returning to North America he continued performing while devoting himself to the study of natural history and ethno-ecology, visiting and learning from native communities in the Southwest desert and the Pacific Northwest.

A much-reprinted essay written while studying biology at the Yale School of Forestry in — entitled "The Perceptual Implications of Gaia" — brought Abram into association with the scientists formulating the Gaia Hypothesis ; he was soon lecturing in tandem with biologist Lynn Margulis and geochemist James Lovelock in Britain and the United States.

In the late s, Abram turned his attention to exploring the decisive influence of language upon the human senses and upon our sensory experience of the land around us. His philosophical work is informed by the European tradition of phenomenology — in particular, by the work of the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Abram's evolving work has also been influenced by his friendships with the archetypal psychologist James Hillman and with the evolutionary biologist, Lynn Margulis — as well as by his esteem for the American poet Gary Snyder and the agrarian novelist, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry.

Writing in the mid-nineteen nineties, finding himself frustrated by the problematic terminology of environmentalism tired of the conceptual gulf between humankind and the rest of nature tacitly implied by the use of conventional terms like "environment" and even by the word "nature" itself, which is so often contrasted with "culture" as though there were a neat divide between the twoAbram coined the phrase "the more-than-human world" in order to signify the broad commonwealth of earthly life, a realm that manifestly includes humankind and its culture, but which necessarily exceeds human culture.

The phrase was intended, first and foremost, to indicate that the space of human culture was a subset within a larger set — that the human world was necessarily sustained, surrounded, and permeated by the more-than-human world — yet by the phrase Abram also meant to encourage a new humility on the part of humankind since the "more" could be taken not just in a quantitative but also in a qualitative sense.

Upon introducing the phrase as a central term in his book subtitled Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World the phrase was gradually adopted by many other theorists and activists, soon becoming an inescapable term within the broad ecological movement. Already translated into numerous languages, the first French translation of the text was completed by the eminent Belgian philosopher-of-science, Isabelle Stengers, in He was named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world, [8] and profiled in the book, Visionaries: The 20th Century's Most Inspirational Leaders.

Wilsonat the old Town Hall in Boston, on science and ethics. An essay by Abram that grew out of that debate, entitled "Earth in Eclipse," has been published in several versions. In the summer ofAbram delivered a keynote address for the United Nations "World Environment Week" in San Francisco, to 70 mayors from the largest cities around the world.

According to their website, the Alliance is a consortium of individuals and organizations working to ease the spreading devastation of the animate earth through a rapid transformation of culture. We employ the arts, often in tandem with the natural sciences, to provoke deeply felt shifts in the human experience of nature.

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Motivated by a love for the more-than-human collective of life, and for human life as an integral part of that wider collective, we work to revitalize local, face-to-face community — and to integrate our communities perceptually, practically, and imaginatively into the earthly bioregions that surround and support them.

In Abram published Becoming Animal: A review in Orion described the book thus:Ecocriticism is “'the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment'” (Bressler ). It holds that humans and the earth are interconnected and seeks both to explore the ways in which literature portrays this bond as well as advocates activism to help protect it.

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May 31,  · ALSCW encourages the reading, writing, criticism, scholarship, and discussions among those committed to the reading and study of literary works. David Abram (born June 24, ) is an American philosopher, cultural ecologist, and performance artist, best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues.

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He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology () and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (), for which he.

May 01,  · The Ecocriticism Reader is the first collection of its kind, an anthology of classic and cutting-edge writings in the rapidly emerging field of literary ecology.

Exploring the relationship between literature and the physical environment, literary ecology is the study of the ways that writing both reflects and influences our interactions with the natural world.

This free English Literature essay on Essay: Ecocriticism is perfect for English Literature students to use as an example. Free Environment papers, essays, and research papers.

Global Trends in the Environment - The environment of planet Earth is being harmed and the causes of .