Doing Environmental Criticism from Where We Are

Abstract

This paper rereads canonical authors of literature in English to highlight issues centering on the environment in their works as well as recent writers who write out of a conviction of environmental injustice, and from perspectives informed by environmental concerns. It suggests how we can redraw our curriculum and teach proactively in the classroom by viewing authors and texts in the light of ecocritical insights derived from Green Cultural Studies and postcolonial ecocriticism in addition to pioneering writers who stressed ecocritical consciousness and the dangers of pollution, climate warming and environmental degradation in the age of the anthropocene. The paper discusses briefly selected writings of Jonathan Swift, Herman Melville, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Allen Ginsberg and Arundhati Roy, and ends with some examples of recent ecocritical poetry from the American poet Robert Hass and Bangladesh’s Kaiser Haq.