Ecocriticism: the ability to investigate cultural artefacts from an ecological perspective. Greg Garrard, Bath Spa University
A recent TV advertisement for a self-storage company shows a tidal flow of ordinary household junk – CD and DVD cases, surplus clothes, shoes and the like – furling and lapping in a bedroom like waves on a shoreline. Most people can probably identify with the predicament, but what interests an ecocritic is a critical absence: a human being with money, by whose agency all that overwhelming stuff ended up there...Ecocritics, who analyse literary and other texts from an environmentalist standpoint, observe that environmental crisis poses not only technical, scientific and political questions, but also cultural ones. Our habits of representation affect and reciprocally reflect our actions, but the enormous temporal and spatial scale of phenomena such as climate change and mass extinction, and the complex moral questions inherent in them, pose challenges for our existing artistic forms.
