Summary Of Dana Phillips The Truth Of Ecology

Dana Phillips, who studies ecocriticism and American literature, employs his 2003 book The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America as a critique of mainstream realist forms of ecocriticism. He places emphasis on the need for ecocriticism to be truly more interdisciplinary, and that ecocritics need to more fully incorporate the sciences, as well as the history and philosophy of those sciences. In its entirety the text suggests, in a somewhat defiant tone, how ecocriticism has operated erroneously in its conception and current practices, and how it might better operate if ecocritics enhanced their ecological/scientific knowledge and adhered to more theoretical foundations of literary criticism. Phillips’ text provides theoretical, cultural, philosophical, and historical backgrounds to support these claims. Specifically, in the fourth chapter titled “Art for Earth’s
And in fact, aside from a poem discussed in the final chapter, seem to be the only thing that Dana Phillips talks about positively.
Peterson’s guide is used as an example of the effective use of representations that are sort of false, especially visually, but are represented that way purposefully to convey meaning and do the job of guiding readers in identifying birds. The stylized representations come from a scientific mind. The art and the science are there. But according to Dana Phillips, neither are too realistic. While Petersons’ body of work is not narrative, like most of the subject matter in ecocriticism, it does highlight a larger part of Phillips argument against realism (mimesis). In his analysis of A Field Guide to the Birds, Phillips shows how when one uses the