Ecocriticism in an Age of Terror

Abstract

In his article "Ecocriticism in an Age of Terror" Simon C. Estok argues that we cannot ignore the context of terror in and through which ecocriticism works and that the relationships between the imagining of terror on the one hand and the conceptualizing of hostile environments on the other is in very serious need of critical analysis. Changes in how we think about nature are also long overdue, as are changes in how we think about doing ecocriticism. Working toward these changes now in our scholarship will take us leaps and bounds closer to the activist intervention about which ecocriticism has always fantasized. The contexts through which ecocriticism work today are much different than they were twenty years ago when ecocriticism made its entrance with such anticipation, hope, naïveté, and optimism. To mainstream ecocritics, theory was out, mimetic realism was in, and the future looked bright and restorable. The anti-climax with which the twentieth century rolled into the twenty-first was only outdone by the terror that blindsided the world and has grown like a cancer to involve many an unwitting accomplice. The "theory" that exploded onto the ecocritical scene in 2009 and brought us the term ecophobia has also radically altered things.

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