생태비평의 자연보전주의 전통과 미국초기생태문학 재고

Abstract

Since its inception in the mid-1990s as an emerging literary study in the United States, ecocriticism has gained a tremendous attention and enjoyed its status as one of the most important literary critical schools. During the past two decades of development and expansion, ecocriticism has gone through three "waves": from ecocentric wave through environmental wave to a recent post-colonial, multi-cultural wave. The first wave, however, has persisted and predominated ecocritical studies in the United States. Persistence of the ecocentric tendency in ecocritical studies, which is closely related to American veneration of wilderness as pristine nature, is largely attributed to the early ecocriticism's determination of Henry David Thoreau as the 'reference point' of ecocritical discourse. Facing current stagnation and paradoxical dilemma of being helplessness for social responsibility, ecocriticism indeed needs to accommodate conservation tenets in its discourse that has stuck to preservation tenets alone. The movement toward ecocriticism's comprehensive approach may well begin with reconsideration of the origin of ecocritical literature. James Fenimore Cooper and his novel The Pioneers rather than Thoreau is aptly the best candidate. Cooper has been considered as the father of true American literature and his major works appeared one generation earlier than Thoreau. Specifically his novel The Pioneers, whose setting was on the historical and social background of the late 17th and early 18th century of a settlement in Northeastern America, weaves the preservation and conservation ideas in a real social circumstance, an early settlement town in New York state. The conservation causes justified by the town leader Judge Temple and the hunter Nattye Bumppo are surprisingly congruous to the late 19th century and early 20th century conservation movement causes of government policy, democratic development, and sportsmanship that have been considered as the origin of American conservation by historians. The pavement toward such comprehensive ecocriticism with Cooper as the new pioneer of ecological literature may well help ecocriticism get out of its current stagnation as a viable literary method and its dilemma of being ineffectiveness in having an effect on environment-related problems.