“I Have This Kind of Grief for the Earth”: A.S. Byatt’s Ecopoetics in Ragnarök, “Thoughts on Myth” and “Sea Story”

IF 0.1 0 LITERARY THEORY & CRITICISM American, British and Canadian Studies Pub Date : 2020-12-01 DOI:10.2478/abcsj-2020-0016

Alexandra Cheira

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract A.S. Byatt has expressed deep misgivings regarding the role which the human species has played in mis/shaping the natural world due to the wilful blindness which guides human behaviour in this respect. In fact, Byatt has focussed on the destruction of the planet caused by greedy and environmentally-unaware human beings in fictional texts such as Ragnarök: The End of the Gods (2011) or “Sea Story” (2013), as well as in critical pieces such as “Thoughts on Myth” (2011). Hence, I am particularly interested in investigating how Byatt’s texts have been shaped by environmental concerns, as expressed in both her fiction and her critical work. My reading of Byatt’s ecopoetics will therefore be set within the theoretical framework of ecocriticism. Finally, I will also examine Byatt’s argument that in a way her early fictional work was “a questioning quarrel” with her former Cambridge teacher F.R. Leavis’s, whose “vision and values” she nevertheless “inherit[s] and share[s]” (Passions of the Mind, 2) in light of Leavis’s discussion of “the organic community” as proto-ecocritical writing.

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“我对地球有这样一种悲伤”:拜厄特在Ragnarök、《神话思考》与《海上故事》中的生态诗学

A.S. Byatt对人类在错误塑造自然世界中所扮演的角色表达了深深的疑虑，因为在这方面，人类的行为被故意的盲目所引导。事实上，拜亚特在《Ragnarök:众神的终结》(2011)或《海洋故事》(2013)等虚构文本中，以及《神话思考》(2011)等批判性作品中，都关注了贪婪和对环境一无所知的人类对地球造成的破坏。因此，我特别感兴趣的是调查拜亚特的文本是如何被环境问题所塑造的，正如她在小说和评论作品中所表达的那样。因此，我对拜厄特生态诗学的阅读将被置于生态批评的理论框架内。最后，我还将考察拜亚特的观点，即在某种程度上，她早期的小说作品是与她在剑桥的前老师f·r·里维斯的“一场质疑性的争吵”，但她“继承并分享了”里维斯的“视野和价值观”(《心灵的激情》，第2期)，根据里维斯关于“有机共同体”作为原始生态批评写作的讨论。

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来源期刊

American, British and Canadian Studies Arts and Humanities-Literature and Literary Theory

CiteScore

0.20

自引率

0.00%

发文量

审稿时长

10 weeks

期刊介绍： Founded in 1999, American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, is currently published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Re-launched in refashioned, biannual format, American, British and Canadian Studies is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, ABC Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.