Teaching Ecocriticism and Cinema

Abstract

In her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, Cheryll Glotfelty (1996) suggested that the history of ecocriticism be considered in terms analogous to Elaine Showalter’s three stages in the development of feminist criticism. First, in this scenario, comes the examination of ‘images of nature’ (or of women, in Showalter’s account). Next comes the ‘literary tradition’ stage, which, for ecocritics, involves uncovering and revalorising the tradition of ‘nature writing’ and of fiction and poetry that illustrates ‘ecological awareness’. Finally comes the ‘theoretical’ phase, which draws ‘on a wide range of theories to raise fundamental questions’ about the ‘symbolic construction’ of nature and the non-human world (pp. xxii–iv).