| dc.description.abstract | This thesis suggests that there is an urgent need for academic work in literary and
cultural studies to become more responsive to the contemporary eco-social crisis of environment and
development. Questioning the sustainability of current practices, I introduce an approach which
has emerged in the attempt to reorient my own work in English Studies towards what I call
environmental literacy.
My discussion consists of a prologue, six chapters, and an epilogue. The prologue is a story essay
which presents through metaphor and narrative some of the questions which later chapters explore in
more familiarly academic register. Chapters One and Two assemble the theoretical tools which have
shaped my priorities. The first situates the project in terms of issues in South African
eco-politics, and goes on to introduce potentially useful models in eco-criticism , environmental
history, ecological philosophy and feminist theory. The second chapter argues that elements in
Mahayana Buddhism (specifically teachings on emptiness and dependent arising and their
relation to
compassion) offer suggestive models for further radicalizing our theory I practice. The
following degree chapters experiment with writing environmentally literate responses to several
texts (one historical and the rest contemporary). Chapter Three is an appreciative reading of the
representation of the Garden in William Blake's poem The Book of Thel (1789), Chapter Four brings
personal narrative into an analysis of Gary Snyder's epic poem Mountains and Rivers Without End
(1996), and Chapter Five is a critical survey of eco-cultural texts produced in South Africa during
the period 1986- 1996. In Chapter Si.." I report on some of the pedagogical implications of thee
orientation 1 have described , drawing on thee experience of teaching at the University of the
Western Cape. The epilogue is brief and imagistic. The written text of the thesis is accompanied by
pictures of people, plants and places. | en_US |
