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UPA Perpustakaan Universitas Jember

Material ecocriticism, genes, and the phobia/philia spectrum

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Some materials may have more agency than we might imagine or wish This was the radical proposal of E.O. Wilson more than three decades ago in Biophilia (1984). Evolutionary biologists have long speculated about the genetic roots of both our affinity with and our acrimony to nature, and ecocritics have been quick to fix on biophilia as a tenet of environmental salvation. The obverse side has won less favor. But the cheerful picture of a world run by biophilic impulses is as fanciful and inaccurate as utopic visions of a world without anger or evil. Irrational fears of snakes and darkness, for starters, are evolution-based ecophobia at play I will review in this article what sorts of attempts ecocritics have made to reconcile our material animality and genetic inheritance with the production of literature sch work has been described by Judith Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians as β€˜β€˜both futile and ideologically dangerous,’’ and sometimes with good reason (which I will get into in detail in the article). One of the things that quickly becomes apparent is that without verifiable data, virtually every ecocritical reading or theory we do amounts to little more than what Richard Lewontin calls β€˜β€˜an exercise in plausible story telling rather than a science of testable hypotheses.’’ One of the ways to avoid
this without becoming a mouthpiece for the sciences is to recognize that behavioral
traits, though often shared, are contextual and individual, meaning that any kind of empirical or systemic analysis must also be case-by-case and not reducible to the kind of templates that are, perhaps, more pleasing to literary critics. Maybe we can plop deconstruction or new historicism down on any old text, but material ecocriticism of the sort I am proposing here is a much more painstaking endeavor. With

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