New Directions in Ecocriticism

This paper was originally presented as a part of an evening "Ecocriticism Forum" at the 2008 International Conference on Literature and the Environment in Wuhan, China. It followed Terry Gifford's "Recent Critiques of Ecocriticism" and Scott Slovic's "The Hopefulness of Ecocriticism", and outlined and elaborated. some of the main directions ecocriticism is currently following. The written version here follows the, oral version, though in more detail. The paper finishes with the proposition that although ecocriticism has gained considerable acceptability and has, in many ways, become somewhat Mainstream within academic circles, its influence outside of such circles has been at best dubious. This essay thus concludes with questions increasingly characteristic within ecocriticism about relationships with activism, questions about how to incorporate the activist goals that were,from the start, central on the horizon of ecocritical visions.