각 주'로 읽는 자연-생태비평과 자연체험

Abstract

Since its inception in the early 1990s as a recognizable critical school, ecocriticism has made a rapid growth and evolved into diverse directions within a short period of time. Based on its history, it is predictable that it will continue to grow and diversify. Given the remarkable accomplishments and expected further growth of ecocriticism, as some ecocritics argue, the time has come for the ecocritics to review the field critically and ask what directions it might best take in the future. During the past decade or so the two most prominent features of ecocriticism have been its special focus on earth-centered approach to literary studies and its consequent critical analysis of nature writing and literature of wilderness on the one hand, and, as a reaction to the first tendency, its expansion of boundaries beyond eco-centered topics and literary works in order to address more pressing and down-to-earth issues of environment-related problems from the broader spectrum, on the other. These two tendencies of ecocriticism, however, have neglected ecocritics' own natural experience as a research method in critical analyses of literary work of nature. This negligence proves that ecocritics, like the 'High Theory' of the 1970s and 80s, in some sense still cling to the literary world instead of the real world, even though they value the world of nature as an analytic subject. That ecocritics need to rely on natural experience in their scholarship of research and teaching is attributed to the following facts: Ecocriticism, above all, takes the importance of real nature seriously; understanding of real nature requires interpreters' experiential intuitive approach as well as scientific one; and great nature writing and nature literature have emerged from the natural experience of the writers, which in turn demands that critical readers of such literature should undergo similar natural experience. Ecocriticism cannot claim to be a proper and legitimate critical school of literature of nature until ecocritics start adopting as a critical method their own "foot notes" of the nature worlds inhabited, experienced, and created by nature writers.