1. Literature & Environment
Lecture 4: Theory ecocriticism 3

2. -Intrinsic value of nature
1. Question: is there any intrinsic and independent value of nature?
2. “Flower” by Kim Chun-Soo (김춘수 시인의 “꽃”)
Before speaking her name
she had been nothing but a gesture.
When I spoke her name,
she came to me and became a flower.
Now who will speak my name,
one fitting this colour and fragrance of mine,
as I had spoken hers
So that I may go to her and become her flower.
We all yearn to become something.
I yearn to become an unforgettable meaning to you
And you to me

3. 내가 그의 이름을 불러주기 전에는
그는 다만
하나의 몸짓에 지나지 않았다.
내가 그의 이름을 불러주었을 때
그는 나에게로 와서
꽃이 되었다.
내가 그의 이름을 불러준 것처럼
나의 이 빛깔과 향기에 알맞는
누가 나의 이름을 불러 다오.
그에게로 가서 나도
그의 꽃이 되고 싶다.
우리들은 모두
무엇이 되고 싶다.
나는 너에게 너는 나에게
잊혀지지 않는 하나의 의미가 되고 싶다.
3. Possibility of intrinsic value of nature in ecotheology

4. -Models for the relationship between human and nature
1. Domination Model: the anthropocentric view that humans dominate the environment
2. Caretaking Model: still anthropocentric view that positions humans as caretakers of the earth
3. Biocentric Model: rejects anthropocentric views and explores the connectedness of all living and nonliving things
-M. Buber’s I and Thou relationship
1. Martin Buber (1878–1965): Born in Austria, Jewish theologian and philosopher
2. Taught from 1938 to 1953 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem after leaving Nazi Germany
3. His best-known work, Ich und Du (1923, trans. I and Thou, 1937)
4. I-Thou & I-It

5. =Video Clip from good and bad relationships
5. I-Thou
i. a reciprocal relationship
ii. thou is no thing among things because my Thou acts on me as I act on it
6. I-It
i. rejects the reciprocal dynamic
ii. the relationship is permeated by means because the it becomes an object among objects
7. Between humans
i. I-Thou: refers to an intimate, caring relation which accepts another person for what he is
ii. I-It: refers to the inevitable use of objects and persons for private, selfish purposes
=Video Clip from good and bad relationships

6. =New Historicism and Hermeneutic Circle
8. Between human and nature
i. I-Thou: an interactive relationship between the human and nature, not in an exploitative and dominant sense, but in a caring and organic sense; nature is no longer treated as an object or instrument with purely functional value, but is regarded as a whole and as a unity with its own independent intrinsic values.
ii. I-It: Nature only exists for human needs.
=New Historicism and Hermeneutic Circle
-Question: the relationship between the past and the contemporary

7. =New Historicism
-Origin & Concept
1. Developed in the United States during the 1980s; now firmly established in many English literature departments; journals such as Representations, New Literary History, English Literary History, and English Literary Renaissance
2. First clearly defined as a critical tendency by Stephen Greenblatt in 1982 in The Forms of Power and The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance
3. It attends primarily to the historical and cultural conditions of its production, its meanings, its effects.
4. It eschews distinctions between literature and the cultural and social context within which it was produced: literature as both a product and a producer of cultural energies and codes

8. -New Criticism over against New Historicism
1. John Crowe Ransom's The New Criticism in 1941; this theory was prominent in American literary criticism until late in the 1960s
2. Opposing the biographies of authors, the social context of literature, and literary history, it insisted that the proper concern of literary criticism is with a detailed consideration of the work itself as an independent entity without any historical contextualization
3. What we value, such as beauty, does not change over time

9. =Hermeneutic Circle
-Notion of hermeneutic
1. “Concerning interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts” (OED)
2. The methodology of interpretation / a toolbox for treating problems of the interpretation of human actions, texts and other meaningful material
-Genealogy
1. A long tradition as the set of problems it addresses have been prevalent in human life; a highly developed practice of interpretation in Greek antiquity, aiming at diverse interpretanda like oracles, dreams, myths, philosophical and poetical works, laws and contracts
2. The beginning of ancient hermeneutics as a more systematic activity goes back to the exegesis of the Homeric epics

10. 3. The most remarkable characteristic of ancient exegesis was allegorisis (allegoría, from alla agoreuein, i.e., saying something different)
4. Modern Hermeneutical thinkers: Heidegger, Bultmann, Ricoeur and Gadamer
-The hermeneutic circle
1. The idea that we always understand or interpret out of some presuppositions
2. A prominent theme ever since the philologist Friedrich Ast (1808: 178) drew attention to the circularity of interpretation:
“The foundational law of all understanding and knowledge is to find the spirit of the whole through the individual, and through the whole to grasp the individual”

11. 3. Heidegger’s Hermeneutics
i. First, we have to acknowledge that there are anticipations in every understanding
ii. Second, we can sort them out through the self-understanding of understanding (Auslegung, interpretation, elucidation)
iii. Third, we should dismiss through destruction false anticipations and replace them by more authentic ones
iv. Some of our anticipations are blindly taken over from an unquestioned tradition or the prevailing chatter (Gerede), and impede an understanding of the things themselves
v. It is incumbent upon us to develop more authentic and more accurate projects of understanding.
vi. Heidegger’s life-long destruction of the history of Western thought in the hope of unfolding a more original understanding of Being

12. -New Historicism & Hermeneutic Circle
1. Using old texts –> to interpret –> historical cultures -> to interpret our present day culture, ideas, selves: synchronizing the past and the present
2. New Historicism uses history to interpret the present; it makes past, ancient, literature relevant today
3. Relationship between the past and the present
1. Heidegger: at birth we are all randomly thrown into a culture
2. Innate and culture