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“Ravaging the Earth,Wasting Our Patrimony” Excess Hunting, Landscape Depletion, and Environmental Apocalypticism in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians sheng-yen yu When debating Michel Foucault on Dutch television in 1971, Noam Chomsky observed that intellectuals need to take up two tasks to deal with class power: one is to envision “a future just society,” or, more precisely , to create “a humanistic social theory” predicated on “some firm and humane concept of the human essence or human nature”; the other is to cognize the nature of power, oppression, terror, and destruction in our own society, including that in “the economic, commercial, and financial institutions,” in, as Foucault mentioned, “the administration, the police, the army, and the apparatus of the state,” and in the family, the university, and all educational systems (131). Chomsky and Foucault ’s common concern with how to confine power within a system of justice in human society should be extended to the entire ecosphere. In fact, this crucial ethical imperative has been at the center of academic ecocriticism as well as of environmental movements. If the most important function of contemporary literature is, as Glen A. Love opined in 1990, “to redirect human consciousness to a full consideration of its place in a threatened natural world,” then literary criticism may hope to reinstate its “lost social role” by addressing significant ecological issues (“Revaluing” 237, 238). In 1991, soon after Love pointed to a possible direction for contemporary literature and literary criticism to restore their social function, Scott Russell Sanders complained in “Speaking a Word for Nature” that much contemporary fiction was devoid of “any sense of nature” (183), an ecocritical comment that betrays, as Rob Nixon would put it, an “unselfconscious parochialism” (“Environmentalism” 233). In a general critique of environmentalism in the humanities, Nixon has pointed out that “literary environmentalism was developing de facto as an off-shoot of American studies” (234). In view of this fact, Sanders’s complaint reveals not only his embarrassingly limited Anglo-American vision but 84 sheng-yen yu also a typical assumption that ecocriticism can be adequately applied only to nature writing. However, many critics have suggested in recent years that the ecocritical canon and practice be expanded beyond their seemingly exclusive focus on British and American nature writing and criticism (Feder 43; Rosendale xxvii). In fact, not only are ecocritics extending their attention beyond “the romantic Euroamerican canon and its nature writers like Muir and Thoreau toward other traditions, including those of oriental and Native American cultures,” but they have also started to employ “techniques of feminism, ethnic studies, biography, and postmodern analysis along with tools borrowed from geography, anthropology , and natural history” (Harrington and Tallmadge, introduction x). What is emerging in the present state of ecocriticism as a movement is thus “a multiplicity of approaches and subjects” that include, among others,“naturewriting,deepecology,theecologyofcities,ecofeminism, the literature of toxicity, environmental justice, bioregionalism, the lives of animals, the revaluation of place, interdisciplinarity, eco-theory” and “previously unheard voices” (Love, Practical 5). Indeed, ecocriticism has become an assemblage of approaches with nearly nothing in common but a collective concern with the environment (Mazel, introduction 2). In an age when globalization is at issue in the fields of economics , politics, literary and cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology, environmental issues require, at least, an equally wide range of coverage in ecocritical intellectual inquiry. The 2004 devastating tsunami in Southeast Asia and the 2005 hellish hurricane Katrina in New Orleans both signify nature’s backlash against human ravaging of the earth. As the increasingly endangered environment presages an ecocatastrophe that has been looming large in recent years, ecocriticism can, as Scott Slovic puts it, “function as society’s conscience” (foreword xi). Moreover , as a fundamentally ethical project, it may serve to issue a timely warning to those who are lost in the myth of economic development and the maelstrom of technological innovation. As a literary and analytical practice, Robert Kern suggests in “Ecocriticism : What Is It Good For?” ecocriticism “becomes most interesting and useful . . . when it aims to recover the environmental character or orientation of works whose conscious or foregrounded interests lie elsewhere” (260). Taking the cue from Kern and broadening our vision beyond the American ecocritical turf, we are sure to discover that much non-Anglo-American recent fiction has articulated its sensitivity to ecological issues in numerous ways.1 J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbar­ [18.188.252.23] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 00:30 GMT...

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