Towards A Green Canon:an Ecological Study Of"New Period"Literature

Ecocriticism is a critical insurgency that rose in North America in the 90's and has now become a global movement. Although literary theories have shown a tendency of getting out of the textual close reading and paying more attention to the outsise world, this "world" means to a large extent the society or the human world. Ecocriticism argues that the world is to include the natural world, and art is to be related to nature and life. Ecocriticism, by focusing on the relationship between man and nature, enables the critics to break further out of the social-historical context of the literary works, so that when they review the formation of canon and critique the present literary theories, they are able to bring the whole earth biosphere into their academic vision and represent the absent identitiy of nature in the texts and even in culture. From the day it came into being, ecocriticism has been challenged by traditional theories, but once it applied the postmodern methodology of decentralizing and deperipheralizing that had already been acknowledged by feminism and post-colonialism, it has increasingly been vigorous. This is also "thanks to" the environmental deterioration in that more and more people feel it necessary to consider the issue against a cultural rather than a scientific background. Ecocriticism is not only an expression of social justice tended to by earnest critics, its significance lies as well in fully unfolding the critical visual field, which indicates literary studies have crossed not only other humanities but also scientific disciplines.While having won a beachhead position in the western critical field, ecocriticism has already found its counterparts in China. Lu Shuyuan's Ecological Research in Literature and Art and Zeng Yongcheng's The Green Reflection of Art represent the achievement of Chinese ecocritical movement. Ecocriticism offers the Chinese academy an opportunity to communicate with the western, for the object of their study is an issue with which all human beings are confronted. Furthermore, the traditional Chinese culture has rich ecological elements such as the faith that man is an integral part of nature. This agrees with the deconstruction of dualism done by the western ecocritics. Thus it will be very meaningful if I put ecocriticism in the Chinese context on one hand and employs it to interpret some typical texts such as those written by Zhang Wei, Xu Gang and Wei An on the other.Based on an review of the theories of ecocriticism, this dissertation attempts to re-interpret some peripheral texts and to update their values. It is possible for Chinese ecocriticism to turn to the strategy of make a revisionist reformation of the traditional canon. It is possible to construct a green canon the value of which is mainly in accordance with ecological insights, namely, the anti-anthropocentric viewpoint and the consciousness of "place". According to the green benchmark, for instance, Wei An's The Events of the Land that has been considered minor will be regarded as a green canonical writing.