Introductory Post

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Image by Anastasia Gretšiškina


 We, Anastasia Gretšiškina, Svetlana Hatšaturjan, Laura Vahtramäe, Hülja Varjula, Maksim Kamrõš, Anna Zubkova (English Philology and Culture, BA), Jana Vinkel (English Language and Culture, BA), Olga Skaistkalne (Slavonic Languages and Cultures, MA), Mariam Meparishvili (Literature, Visual Culture and Film studies, MA), Grettel Sokolov and Raimo Kerme (Liberal Arts in Humanities, BA),  welcome you to our blog Green Literature: Leaf to Leaf. Here, we will be discussing various literary texts from the ecocritical point of view. We will be analyzing how nature is portrayed in literature and how it is connected with the real world and environmental problems. This blog will be written for the LIFE course in Tallinn University. LIFE stands for Learning in Interdisciplinary Focused Environment.
Next, we are going to mention some of the topics of our future posts. We will analyse Estonian national epic poem Kalevipoeg, Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and folk literature. Throughout the aforementioned literary texts, we will pay attention to the nature and its depiction in literature. We will also try to find interesting analogy between nature and images of nature in art and media.  What is more, we will study the ways the natural world is represented in our real life, and what crucial issues concern it.  
At the basis of the chosen ecocritical method lie the nature and culture both inhuman and human. The idea of the study is that the human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and being affected by, it is coexisting with nature. (Sõrmus et al., 2013, p. 110).  The portrayal of nature in literature can be seen as early as in the Bible. In the Bibles (e.g., the Hebrew Bible, the Roman Bible), we can find ''interconnectedness between plants, minerals, fossils; habitats and climates; bodies, breath, languages; oral and written traditions; societies and their stories; and the convergences and dissonances among these.'' Thus we can analyse the Bibles from an ecocritical point of view (Rigby, 2011).
In the ecocritical literature, we often come across the thesis that nature can help humans find their place in life, realise themselves. In this way, Austen in her novels draws the inseparable metaphorical link between women and nature, which helps Austen’s female characters realise themselves in their society. Drawing metaphorical parallels between female characters and trees, Austin suggests that the diversification of one’s views and experiences increases one's true love for the nature (Anderson). The ecocritical method of reading literature presumes the study from language perspective, which allows one notice certain clichés in respect of nature. Thus, nature is usually referred to as “the green world” in English and some other languages, though the nature itself is much more colourful.
All in all, follow our posts to investigate the interconnectedness between the nature and literary texts.



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