"Something that would have shed itself in nature" : ecological politics, ecocriticism and the poetry of Don McKay and Jorie Graham
Date
2001
Authors
Forster, Sophia Ella
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Abstract
This thesis reads the unconventional "nature" poetry of Don McKay and Jone Graham in relation to ecological politics by means of a critique of the emerging field of literary ecocriticism. I argue that ecocriticism's elaboration of the relationship between ecological politics and poetics is limited by its relatively underexamined commitments to the particular version of eco-politics known as radical ecology. This movement's identity politics paradigm limits ecocriticism's ability to reveal the political dimensions of poetry which problematizes the idea of transparent experience and knowledge of nonhuman nature. I suggest that an ecological politics of performativity which emphasizes the instability and contingency of both the meanings that we assign to nonhuman nature and our relationships to it offers a context for considering as profoundly ecological the comedy of Don McKay's poetry and the phenomenological bent of Jone Graham's Materzalzsm (1993).