Research Poster

Click to open the research poster I have completed for my project, which summarizes what I've been up to:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can the Arts Help the Climate Crisis?

Image
This is a big question, and one that is at the heart of my summer research! Ecocriticism, the literary movement that seeks to explore the roles of nature in a text, has a lot to say about this. There aren't any definitive answers, but I thought it might be interesting to start unpacking this question and offer an opinion.  What does the theory say?  As mentioned, one of the key debates covered by ecocriticism is how far artistic and cultural discourse can actually prove valuable to solving the climate crisis. Greg Garrard discusses and summarizes some of this this in his book Ecocriticism to suggest that, by ecocriticism's currently dominating ideas, ecocritical theory, environmental writing, and art cannot - and should not -  develop new scientific ecological understanding. The reasons for this are multiple. Most notably, literary studies cannot offer new quantitative research to the ecological sciences. Equally, critics such as Timothy Morton suggest that viewing nature...
Read more

The Pastoral: A Gloss for Social Inequality?

I stumbled across perhaps my favourite argument that I have read in research so far earlier this week. In Terry Gifford's "Pastoral", Gifford introduces the question as to whether pastoralism in literature constitutes a gloss for social and political inequality. This post isn't going to be overly formal but I found this idea so interesting to think about that I thought I'd try and explore it a bit more.  Firstly, what is the pastoral?  Well, it's not very clear cut. Or at least, not anymore. Gifford talks about this a lot in the first chapter and identifies three key ways we might approach the term;  - The earliest definition of "pastoral" is the literary tradition largely intended for urban audiences which would regale cool stories of shepherds chilling on the hillsides and living in harmony with nature. This developed into a broader tradition whereby characters would "retreat" into nature and bring back some insights and knowledge for the...
Read more

Sometimes Research is Daunting

This is a less academic/ nature-y/ literature-y post and more one that addresses the research process.  I thought I would write a brief check-in and give a bit of insight into what I've been doing lately.  Namely, some less-romantic-than-anticipated and stressful things. These things primarily include; dense critical reading, dense critical reading and a bit more dense critical reading.  I've spent the last week grappling with a number of foundational texts in ecocriticism, the literary theory which explores (as Greg Garrard puts it), the "relationship between literature and the physical world." Whilst it has been very interesting and I would like to think that I am perhaps a bit cleverer now, it's also been quite daunting and complex. Of course, the impression that developing research is a breeze and that arguments just come strutting along into our heads fully formed is a total myth - and so I thought I would just spend a bit of time making this mythic status mo...
Read more