Between Nature and (Counter-)Culture: Allen Ginsberg’s Social Ecopoetics

• 발행기관: 한국영미어문학회
• 저자명: Xing Hu Gi Taek Ryoo
• 간행물 정보: 『영미어문학』제155호, 331~357쪽, 전체 27쪽
• 주제분류: 어문학 > 영어와문학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2024.12.31

국문 초록

The countercultural spirit of environmentalism was partly shaped by Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry often unflinchingly exposes and denounces the ills of industrialism and capitalism and their impacts on the natural world. For Ginsberg, social and environmental problems were inextricably intertwined with industrialization and capitalism. In the 1950s, the same decade that saw the composition of Ginsberg’s Howl, social theorist Murray Bookchin crafted his new environmental theory of social ecology, which demonstrates that ecological abuse stems from deep-seated social problems and that the growth-oriented logic of capitalism fundamentally leads to ecological crisis. As a strategy for social ecologists to approach environmental issues, Bookchin proposes building a new ecological community without the oppressive hierarchy that can exist between human and human and between human and nonhuman. Ginsberg’s insights into the root causes of and solutions to environmental problems can find their counterpart in Bookchin’s theories of social ecology. This paper draws on Bookchin’s theory to examine how Ginsberg’s ecopoetics illuminates the interconnectedness of social and ecological issues in the era of centralized politics and capitalism, and how his social ecopoetics helped foster a new environmental awareness in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

목차

1. Introduction

2. Intersections of Human Society and Ecology

3. The Social Oppression and Ecological Abuse of Capitalism

4. Conclusion

Works Cited

키워드

Allen Ginsberg Beat Generation social ecology counterculture movement Murray Bookchin bureaucracy and capitalism ecological community