Ecocriticism - Science topic

Dear Heather Thaxter , thank you very much for your suggestion. It will help me a lot.

Best professional one mentioned by colleaque ,Journal of Ecocritism .also some universities like Oxford publish such subject.

Post-truth means that anybody can make any kind of claim and the original claim goes farther and faster than the rebuttal or fact check does.

Therefore, conspiracy theories and false claims are often seen by more people than the truth. This can greatly affect what people believe about environmental issues, such as climate change.

Thank you very much for this first suggestion; these are very interesting links, and I'm sure they will already help me with my search!

Regards,

S. Schrey

John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath concerns migrants from the dustbowl South of the 1930s trekking their way to California. Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson describes the impact of the Galveston Storm and its immediate aftermath on the survivors of the worst US natural disaster. The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald deals with fast-lane suburban life during the roaring twenties. One of the themes of this classic novel is the careless wastefulness of people as well as things by major characters who create disasters for others and leave the scene unconcerned. Finally, although not a work of fiction, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring written nearly 60 years ago was perhaps the first, mass-popular book that called attention to the warning signals that the environment was flashing.

Dear Julio San Martín Órdenes, would you please read on Niche Theory on Species interaction? I think it would be valuable to your demand.

Brotherly!

That sounds like a really interesting course! If you are interested in a Middle Eastern "twist" you may explore a 20th century adaptation of A Thousand and One Night (Arabian Nights) where Noble Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz deconstructs the fantastical world of the classic work excluding all creatures except for the Jinn.

http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/14117/1/MagicandtheSupernaturalmagic1ever101232012.pdf (p.15)

I would like to comment on the suggestions made here and offer some of my own.

Samuel Butler's "Erewhon" is very clever and like the title - "nowhere," sort of backwards, everything is reversed - crime becomes disease and disease becomes crime. It's a satire, not a proposal for an alternative society. Important nuance there.

As for Eric Blair, known as George Orwell, "Animal Farm," which he cribbed from a story read on the BBC by Ignazio Silone (pen name of Secundino Tranquilli from my Abruzzo) is totally a satire of the Soviet system and in no way a serious proposal for an alternative society much less an economic system. How about reading the question instead of just spouting off? The same goes for most of the answers here. Gandhi did do some serious thinking about capitalism and his homespun movement undermined Britain's wool industry, but again that is not what the question is about, neither Thomas More's "Utopia," another satire of his times and not a proposal for an alternative society. someone mentioned Orwell's "1984" and "Brave New World," both cheerfully ripped off of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We," by far the most original and disturbing of totalitarian dystopias, reflecting his disgruntlement with the Soviet Union. Again, not a proposal, but a biting satire.

While most utopias and dystopias are critiques of the authors' contemporaneous worlds or their presumed extensions, some of these utopias do propose another world, including an economic system. Tommaso Camponella's "The City of the Sun" is one such society and economic system. It reflects one of the oldest outlines for a different or better society, Plato's "Republic." Do these count as serious proposals for an economic alternative? Tough judgment - there are not enough details to really decide, I believe, in spite of some general parameters.

Most of the time, all authors are reacting to their times, whether satirically or constructively. Although I think Ayn Rand was a poor and tiresome writer, again reacting against the Soviet Union and its Communist philosophy with her political pulp fiction in "Anthem," "Atlas Shrugged," and "The Fountainhead," she inspired with her salon in California people like Alan Greenspan who become Chairman of the US Federal Reserve and in this sense, she strongly influenced the direction of US and world capitalism.

Vincenzo Di Nicola

University of Montreal &

The George Washington University