Patrick D. MurphyDepartment of English

University of Central Florida

Practicing Ecocriticism in Literary and

Cultural Studies

NATURE ≠ WILDERNESS

Robert Frost

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun, And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them

made, But at spring mending-time we find them there.

Interpretive Points Low walls delineating property lines, not

to achieve privacy, but to claim property rights.

This wall exists not only as a referential object for the poem but also as a symbol of several artificial human systems of organization and acquisition.

Nature is an activity rather than a setting, and, potentially, as much an agent as the famers.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Additional Points To “walk the line” means to

follow rules. But this ideological obedeicne results in inequality.

Even as they act together, they act individualistically.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

Individualism and Property Rights

Ideology of Individualism

Wall serves no useful function

The Wall serves only as a symbol of values and beliefs

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors." Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: "Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no

cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,That wants it down.

I could say "Elves" to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to meNot of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Conclusions Reached The binary opposition between

nature and culture has actually been dissolved

The neighbor’s view of property may be inherited in a long, historical sense

The poet’s perception of nature as an activity ceaselessly changing calls for a rethinking of human cultural practices.

A Brook in the City

The firm house lingers, though averse to squareWith the new city street it has to wear A number in. But what about the brook That held the house as in an elbow-crook?

I ask as one who knew the brook, its strengthAnd impulse, having dipped a finger lengthAnd made it leap my knuckle, having tossedA flower to try its currents where they crossed.The meadow grass could be cemented downFrom growing under pavements of a town;The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.Is water wood to serve a brook the same?How else dispose of an immortal forceNo longer needed? Staunch it at its sourceWith cinder loads dumped down?

The brook was thrown Deep in a sewer dungeon under stoneIn fetid darkness still to live and run -And all for nothing it had ever doneExcept forget to go in fear perhaps.No one would know except for ancient mapsThat such a brook ran water

But I wonderIf from its being kept forever underThe thoughts may not have risen that so keepThis new-built city from both work and sleep.

Ecopsychology

James Hillman

Jungian Theorist

Ecospcyhology

defines human psychological

health as being based on a

physically health interaction with

and treatment of the rest of nature.

Gary Snyder

Los Angeles Basin

Los Angeles Basin at Night

Night Song of the Los Angeles Basin

Owlcalls,pollen dust blows

Swirl of light strokes writhingknot-tying light paths,calligraphy of cars.

Los Angeles basin and hill slopesCheckered with streetways. Floral loopsOf the freeway express and exchange.

Dragons of light in the darksweep going both waysin the night city belly.The passage of light end to end and rebound,–ride drivers all heading somewhere–etch in their traces to night's eye-mindcalligraphy of cars.

Vole paths. Mouse trails worn inOn meadow grass;Winding pocket-gopher tunnels,Marmot lookout rocks.Houses with green watered gardensSlip under the ghost of the dry chaparral,

Ghostshrine to the L.A. River.The jinja that never was thereis there.Where the river debouchesthe place of the momentof trembling and gathering and givingso that lizards clap hands there–just lizardscome pray, saying"Please give us health and long life."

A hawk, a mouse

Slash of calligraphy of cars

Into the pools of the channelized riverthe Goddess in tall rain dresstosses a handful of meal.

Gold bellies roilmouth-bubbles, frenzy of feeding,the common ones, the bright-colored rare onesshow up, they tangle and tumble,

(continue)

godlings ride by in Rolls Roycewide-eyed in brokers' hallslifted in hotelsbeing presented to, plattersof tidbit and wine,snatch of fame,

churn and roil,

Meal gone the water subsides.

The calligraphy of lights on the nightfreeways of Los Angeleswill long be remembered.

Owlcalls;

late-rising moon.

ASLE

Association for the Study of Literature and

Environment began with a small publication called

The American Nature Writing Newsletter

Literary Nonfiction

British Romantic Poetry

Fiction

Robinson Jeffers Wendell BerryGary Snyder

Edward Abbey

The Monkeywrench Gang

Walden

Reread the literary canon for representations of nature and themes of environmental justiceModernists: Hemingway and

Faulkner

"The Big Two-Hearted River" and The Sun Also Rises

The Sound and the Fury

Barbara Kingsolver

Toni Morrison

Linda Hogan

Leslie Silko

Karen Tei Yamashita

Kim Stanley Robinson

Norman Spinrad

T. C. Boyle

Paolo Bacigalupi

Karen Traviss

Hurricane Katrina

Christopher Hallowell, Holding Back the Sea

Bob Sheets and Jack Williams, Hurricane Watch: Forecasting the Deadliest

Storms on Earth

Judith Howard and Ernest Zebrowski, Category 5: The Story of Camille

R. A. Scotti, Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938

Hurricane Damage

John D. MacDonald, Condominium

Art Bell and Whitley Strieber, The Coming Global Superstorm

The Day After Tomorrow

Thank You!