Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelors
Department
Humanities
First Advisor
Konkol, Margaret
Area of Concentration
English
Abstract
Contemporary ecological thinking and ecocriticism disrupts traditional aestheticized ideas of nature, introducing new perspectives on pastoral. When the contemporary moment and pastoral reconvene, pastoral responds to the real destruction of our world’s environmental spaces due to global climate change and the shrinking signifier nature. As Greg Garrard writes, “It may be that one contemporary pastoral refuge lies within the discourse of ecology itself” (63). When thinkers such as Timothy Morton examine who and what “nature” is for, they perform a task not too dissimilar from pastoral’s conventional applications. Beginning with Virgil’s Eclogues, Chapter One investigates historical definitions of pastoral and the environment through a contemporary critical lens, tracking pastoral’s relevance across Renaissance, Romantic, and Modernist periods through the works of Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, and William Carlos Williams. In Chapter Two, I perform close readings of poems by contemporary eco-poets who reinterpret pastoral and Western nature discourses for a postmodern world. Chapter Three responds with my creative work, Distantia, which recreates the dialogue between Meliboeus and Tityrus from Virgil’s “First Eclogue,” engaging the pastoral mode and making sense of ecological distance. Pastoral’s postmodern interventions re-envision nature’s “cultural baggage,” compelling critical awareness of our sense of place in the world even as the boundaries between these spaces, and ourselves, collapse.
Recommended Citation
Culbertson, Corey, "Nature from a Distance: Western Conceptions of the Environment Through the Context of Postmodern Pastoral Poetry" (2016). Theses & ETDs. 5183.
https://digitalcommons.ncf.edu/theses_etds/5183