Ecocriticism And The Idea Of Culture: Biology And The Bildungsroman
by Helena Feder /
2014 / English / PDF
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Calling for a new direction for ecocriticism that integrates ideas
from the study of other animal cultures with those of cultural and
critical theory, Helena Feder makes a timely intervention in the
constructions of nature and culture by taking a fresh look at the
stories humanism explicitly tells about itself. These stories fall
into the genre of the Bildungsroman, the tale of the individual's
coming into culture that also participates in the myth of culture's
complete separation from and opposition to nature which, Feder
argues, is culture's own origin story.Moving from Voltaire's
Candide to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and from Virginia Woolf's
Orlando to Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Feder dramatizes
Western culture's own awareness of the instability of the binary of
nature and culture. She draws on works by Frans de Waal, Kevin
Laland, and other biologists to create an interdisciplinary,
dialectical notion of culture in ecocritical analysis.
Calling for a new direction for ecocriticism that integrates ideas
from the study of other animal cultures with those of cultural and
critical theory, Helena Feder makes a timely intervention in the
constructions of nature and culture by taking a fresh look at the
stories humanism explicitly tells about itself. These stories fall
into the genre of the Bildungsroman, the tale of the individual's
coming into culture that also participates in the myth of culture's
complete separation from and opposition to nature which, Feder
argues, is culture's own origin story.Moving from Voltaire's
Candide to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and from Virginia Woolf's
Orlando to Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, Feder dramatizes
Western culture's own awareness of the instability of the binary of
nature and culture. She draws on works by Frans de Waal, Kevin
Laland, and other biologists to create an interdisciplinary,
dialectical notion of culture in ecocritical analysis.
