"The field of enquiry that analyzes and promotes works of art which raise moral questions about human interactions with nature, while also motivating audiences to live within a limit that will be binding over generations"[i]
Eco criticism is the study of literature and environment. Jennifer Hamilton in her focus; Cosmic Ecology: Rethinking the Storm in King Lear uses theories of eco criticism from an interdisciplinary aspect, where literature, film, theatre and actual events come together to be analysed. By analysing the storm in Lear Hamilton suggests a ‘green reading’ of texts where we might be able to brainstorm possible solutions for correcting contemporary environmental adversity.
Using ecological values as one would class, gender, race etc. Hamilton also uses Sarah Kane’s Blast to apply theories of eco criticism, using the event of the explosion in Blast to qualify the significance of the storm in Lear where the ‘blast’ in the text remakes the social ecology of the play, much like the effect the storm in Lear has on the play.
Hamilton in this discussion highlights the event as not a thing and hopes that through its transformation under this theoretical world view it points, reflects, represents something else. Hamilton says; “The fact the event was a storm is arbitrary, the importance is the effect it has on Lear.” It is noted here that in Lear perhaps the storm itself is a chatacter.
To better analyse Lear’s storm Hamilton presents contrasts in different staging’s of the text, noting how its metaphoric significance shifts whether translated through the medium of film or theatre, where literal opposes metaphoric interpretations e.g. Peter Brook 1962 Lear vs. Bell Shakespeare’s most recent attempt to stage Lear. This is a meeting between how it is staged and how it is read.
Hamilton references accounting for the complexities of the storm and contributing accounting for the natural and cultural, offering Donna Harraway as a theoretical standing point emphasising a need to review nature and texts about nature and the environment in a new eco sensitive light; “We must find another relation to nature besides reification, possession, appropriation and nostalgia.” Here narrative and nature are learning to think transversally.
Psychoanalytic and Actor Network Theories are also ways Hamilton suggests reading her texts. Actor/Network enables Hamilton to view the storm as an actant and event giving sight to solid and fluid presence in her texts. Psychoanalysis allows for approaches to the public/private spheres, the politics of the family estate and the gravity of empiricism in the many different readings of eco theories.
Hamilton utilizes Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone to explain subjective and social frames in the text and also in the framework of eco criticism. Hamilton argues the need to be able to move between senses proposing the irrational worldviews of the plays is made rational by the seasonal changes i.e. explosion/storm.
Harnessing eco criticism as a tool to unpack texts is revealing of the need for theory to politicize its objects, subject and audience at once. Through the application of eco criticism to Lear’s storm Hamilton has given new methods for approaching classical and contemporary texts; where readings might reflect theoretical sensitivities in the hope to birth actualized change.
[i] Gomides, Camilo. 'Putting a New Definition of Ecocriticism to the Test: The Case of The Burning Season, a film (mal)Adaptation". ISLE 13.1 (2006): 13-23.
thorough review of the talk... with a very strong conclusion about the role that this kind of theory might play - DN+
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