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In this essay, I offer a brief contextualisation of ecocriticism amongst other critical 'isms', followed by an introduction to a theoretical framework that of biosemiotics - which I suggest may prove fruitful to ecocritical and ecophenomenological theorisations. This involves a limited discussion of Peircean semiotics and the semiotic theories (including biosemiotics itself) which both flow from it and also join it to general evolutionary systems theories. I focus, in particular, on Peirce's discussion of inferential logic, and especially on his logic of abductive reasoning, finally I ask what biosemiotic understandings might have to add to earlier critical ways of seeing, and try to begin to offer the beginnings of an answer via a brief consideration of two essays - one on romanticism and one on realism.
I ANOTHER 'ISM'?
At first men will not fully realise what it is that moves them, and will express and explain themselves inadequately. There will be a general agitation of thought, and an action of mind upon mind. There will be a time of confusion, when conceptions and misconceptions are in conflict, and it is uncertain whether anything is to come of the idea at all, or which view of it is to get the start of others ... After a while some definite teaching emerges; and as time proceeds, one view will be modified or expanded by another, and then combined with a third; till the idea in which they centre, will be to each mind what at first it was only to all together.
John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), ch. I, sect. I)1
If the foundation of formal associations is a good guide to the conceptual thickening and realisation of an idea whose quickening was felt considerably earlier, ecocriticism is properly born with the foundation of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), first in the USA and then in the UK (and subsequently worldwide). Both the US and UK ASLEs were born in the same 'moment' of schism, starting in the early 1990s, which produced political and cultural crises of confidence in radical progressive thought and practice generally, and also the gradual strengthening of various anti-Enlightenment fundamentalisms. In this conjuncture, not only was confidence in...