Paradigm Shifts: "The Ecological Turn in Literary Studies": Prof. Kate Rigby

FRIAS Lunch Lecture "Paradigm Shifts in Science", December 3, 2015

Since the early 1990s, a major paradigm shift has been underway in literary studies, which commonly goes by the name of “ecocriticism”. In addition to the new questions it has brought to the field of literary studies, ecocriticism has also significantly reshaped its methodology. Whereas it has been common for literary scholars to draw upon other humanities or social science disciplines to inform their research, ecocritics turn also to the biological sciences, geology, physics, meteorology, science studies, and biosemiotics, repositioning literary history and hermeneutics within a more-than-human frame of reference. In this way, ecocriticism has contributed to the emergence of the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of the “environmental humanities”. Embracing also such game-changing sub-disciplines as ecophilosophy, ecolinguistics, environmental history, multi-species ethnography, and eco-religious studies, the environmental humanities brings fundamental questions of value and meaning, responsibility and rights, care and cruelty, compassion and justice to the major socio-ecological challenges facing the world today.