It is no doubt that we are living in an age of environmental crisis. Being a kind of total attack upon the humanity itself, the environmental crisis is more serious than any other one that men have faced through the history. Day to day, we bear witnes ...

It is no doubt that we are living in an age of environmental crisis. Being a kind of total attack upon the humanity itself, the environmental crisis is more serious than any other one that men have faced through the history. Day to day, we bear witness to a lot of vivid symptoms which endanger our life on this planet. The crisis tells us that something should be done immediately, that there is no time to postpone our decision. What, then, is the role of literature in this age of environmental crisis? Does literature have something to do with environmental awareness? Is literary writing an act of ecological consciousness? Attentive basically to these questions, this study investigates the ways in which literature provides us with a new insight to respond to the problem of environmental crisis.
The main part of the study is concerned with what the eco-centric thinking is and how it is incorporated in the literary writing. There are four main features of eco-centric thinking: the overcoming of anthropocentrism, the new understanding of nature, the relational worldview, and the cyclical worldview. The study first indicts anthropocentrism (human-centered world view) for the initiation of environmental crisis, moving next on to the recognition that once we overcome the ethical limitation of anthropocentrism, a new relationship between man and nature is possible. The relational worldview, as contrasted with an ontological worldview, is based on the principle of equality (rather than hierarchy) of all things; the cyclical worldview, as contrasted with a linear one, is founded upon the idea of flow. These two eco-centric worldviews sees all things as energy rather than as substance.
Then, literary writing can be characterized as eco-centric in that it erases writer's subject. A strong theoretical basis for this idea comes from such prominent literary and philosophical thinkers as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Blanchot. Especially, the theory of 'the death of the author' makes possible the study's key message that writing is a kind of eco-centric procedure. This theory that literature in its nature is closely related to ecology can revolutionize the way in which we see literature. Now, literature becomes a more practical discourse than one used to think. In this sense, the ecological literary theory can be an answer to the recent hot debate on the crisis of humanities.

I. 들어가는 말: 문제제기
II. 생태학적 사유
III. 생태학적 문학론
IV. 나가는 말
인용 문헌
Abstract

I. 들어가는 말: 문제제기
II. 생태학적 사유
III. 생태학적 문학론
IV. 나가는 말
인용 문헌
Abstract