Ecocriticism In Dana Phillips's The Truth Of Ecology
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Those who promote "a pragmatist variation of ecocriticism," to practice Dana Phillips's phrase (The Truth 135), the legitimize their study of literature in terms of conservational values, and hence that link literature with the natural world, fail to recognize that informative theory can be perceived of lacking phonological occupying its center.
It is true that there is also more hypothetically concerned withecocriticalallowance today, but these studies often shortage a chastised focus with the exemption of Dana Phillips's The Truth of Ecology (2003),which is possibly the only remarkable study to put ecocriticism in theory, while his attack on postmodernism on the grounds that it advocates nature's disappearance is a typical oversight.…show more content… Ashe argues, "[t]he nature of the representation is one of the chief concerns of literary theory, but the preponderance of theory is something elseTheorizing Ecocriticism 109ecocritics dislike about current literary studies" (578). This is hard to understand, because, as Arran E. Gare has pointed out, "[t]heoriesare ways of experiencing the world, conceptual frameworks in terms of which the world is interpreted and made sense of " (111). In the words, theories are ways of expressing meaning making processes,and they help us develop critical perspectives of how our sermons construct our realities, how language affects meaning making, and how meanings get contested within particular discourses.
Therefore, it is rather unfortunate to see that even the most theoretically oriented ecocritics, like Dana Phillips, mistake postmodernism with extreme relativist positions. When he boldly but wrongly claims that "postmodernists are the kind of relativists" (The Truth 33), he repeats the common misunderstandings of postmodern thought. This is not too surprising because for many critics postmodernism represents a disruption of reality, a pure textualist orientation, or loss of fixed referents in the real…show more content… In fact, our best teacher here may be none other than John Keats, whose imperative to be capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts is good advice for us, not merely as scholars but also as human beings, as we scramble to prepare for changes to our environment on a scale that human civilization has not previously known, although we might not want to follow Keats in disclaiming any irritable reaching after fact and