I am bound and determined to understand these concepts since my final is fast approaching. In my experience, the best way to fully understand something is to teach it to someone else … that’s where you come in, my dear blog readers! I will be adding sections to this as I go, so if you have any questions, feel free to post and I will answer as best I can.
Logical Fallicies
Here is a link to my Prezi presentation about the fallacies of relevance. I scored 100% on it and the professor noted: “This is the best presentation I’ve seen thus far! Excellent work!” If you need help understanding the logical fallacies of relevance, check out my Prezi!
Ecocriticism
From Beginning Theory by Peter Barry
Ecocriticism is a new movement which studies of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. In the UK it is referred to as “green studies,” but the difference between the two is that there is a tendency for the American writing to be celebratory in tone, whereas the British variation tends to warn of environmental threats spreading from governmental, industrial, commercial and neo-colonial forces.
The relationship between culture and nature indicates some of the debates within ecocriticism. For the ecocritic, nature really exists, out there beyond ourselves, not needing to be ironized as a concept by enclosure within knowing quotation marks, but actually present as an entity which affects us, and which we can affect, perhaps fatally, if we mistreat it. Nature, then, isn’t reducible to an idea which we think up as part of our cultural practice. Theory in general tends to see our external world as socially and linguistically constructed, but ecocriticism calls this long-standing theoretical doctrine into question.
The ecocentered reading focuses outside on the house and its environs, rather than inside, on the owner and his psychology. It uses the ideas of energy, entropy, and symbiosis. Thus, the house exists as an isolated entropic system which has no symbiotic connections at all with the broader biosphere.
