비평영토의 사유화--생태비평과 내러티브 학문

초록

Unlike the mainstream tendency of the text-based, impersonal, and objective practices of ecocriticism, a small group of ecocritics has started redressing this tendency, utilizing their own personal experiences of nature as a useful and effective tool of study. They have incorporated personal voices and narratives of their own story of natural experience in critical analysis and writings. This new tendency in ecocriticism toward the incorporation of personal experience with critical analysis and writing is congruous with the 1990s' new belletrism in literary criticism which characterizes the general shift from 'High Theory' toward more experiential, subjective literary tenor and language of autobiography. Considering the fact that nature writing is, after all, experiential stories told by writers, and that analysis and explanation of such stories on the part of critical readers can also be best accomplished through story-telling, this "autobiographical scholarship" or "narrative scholarship" may well and may as well be regarded as an appropriate method of ecocriticism. Narrative scholarship, however, as is often the case with the writings of most narrative ecocritics, is always exposed to the risk of straying too far into personal, self-referential, subjective tendency, so that ecocritical enterprise as a whole looks too experiential and even trivial. Ecocriticism is vulnerable to such criticism of being too personal and trivial due largely to the fact that from the start it has focused on subject matters rather than theoretical methods. Therefore, for an effective and balanced narrative ecocriticism, ecocritics should employ both experiential elements and scholastic methods in critical study and writing as well. The former enables ecocriticism to be more readable and enjoyable, relieving it from relying too much on dry, abstract, theory-ridden literary study and writing activities; the latter enables ecocriticism to be grounded in a scholastic dimension of criticism without total losing into solipsism and triviality.

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