“To See Things for the First Time”: Before and After Ecocriticism

Summary Ecocriticism has often been blamed to be too entangled with the literatures and the critical and political agendas of the Anglo-American world, and to be historically and aesthetically reductive inasmuch as its favourite texts are from the nineteenth and twentieth century dealing explicitly in motives, imagery and descriptions of the natural environment, more often than not in a troubled relationship with human activity. As human interaction with nature is an issue universally present in literatures across historical and geographical boundaries, these constraints have to be removed in order for ecocriticism to progress. The paper suggests some ways to do so. It introduces a definition with a focus on the cultural processes literature is engaged in, and not on the specific texts or ideological agendas. It is a criticism concerned with a basic cultural boundary through literature, the boundary between humans and nature. Moreover, it proposes a notion, a boundary marker, as a methodological support for textual analysis, and points to the importance of a broader historical view on the concepts used. Finally it uses a broad concept of dialogue as textual dynamics on all levels of the texts as a guideline for the analytical practice, which is finally carried out with Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines ([1987]2005) and Patrick White's Voss ([1957]1994) as the textual basis.