M.A. Theses
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Browsing M.A. Theses by Subject "Ecocriticism in literature."
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Item How the world changes dystopias :|an ecocritical study of evolving climate fiction novels(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2022., 2022.) Erer, Eda Begüm.; Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu, Özlem.There is a deep lack of attention to the discussions of climate change, both in general and in literature. The scientific data suggests that we are at a point of no return when with global warming and we will face great climate disasters in the near future. The Drowned World(1962) written by J. G. Ballard and New York 2140 (2017) written by Kim Stanley Robinson, as novels depicting similar drowned futures, use future narratives to criticize current Anthropocentric stances on climate change, and portray dystopic futures as warnings for the present reader. Reading the novels’ fluid connection to time and place through the lens of science fiction as a genre that blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, this work seeks to trace the entanglements future climate narratives offer as alternatives to current dynamics of capitalism and ecological disaster. Both novels use the motif of the water as an actor that freely flows between boundaries and the different scales of time and disaster depictions show the ineffectiveness of Cartesian binaries against a fast changing climate. Science fiction elements blur the well-established time and space constraints of the Western narrative while questioning the human time and place on Earth. The use of posthuman ecocritical theories offer an alternative to present dichotomies between nature and culture. Science fiction works help to shape different ideologies that do not alienate the human from the the nature, which in turn may help the longevity and quality of human life on the planet.Item The cross-fertilization of the botanical and the literary(Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2019., 2019.) Şahingöz, Ayşenur Feyza.; Fortuny, Kim.Plants are highly complex beings with sophisticated strategies for surviving, thriving and coexisting with fellow members of their own and other species on this planet. Yet the Aristotelean notion that plants are passive and insensitive creatures which pervaded the sciences for centuries is still ingrained in society’s approach to plants. In order to extend moral consideration and responsibility to plants, first we need to make them visible. Science helps cure “plant-blindness” by bringing their complexity to the front. However, other forms of plant knowledge contribute to, and at times compensate for what “scientific” thinking leaves out. Resonating Gary Snyder’s depth ecology, an Ecopoetics that incorporates diverse approaches becomes an answer for a worldview that acknowledges the “…autonomy and integrity of the non-human…,” vegetal other. In Howard Nemerov’s “Learning the Trees,” poetry and botany, specifically plant systematics, come together to reflect on the possibilities and limits inherent in each “language” in “hearing” and “speaking” trees. Whereas, with his Greenhouse poems, Theodore Roethke goes into the cracks and crevices of being, entangled with vegetal life, and brings weeds, vegetal outcasts, out of our peripheral vision, transforming the way we see them. Besides exploring the diverse ways mushrooms have fruited in the poetry of Snyder, Mary Oliver and Marvin Bell, the chapter explores how nature literacy, place literacy and science literacy infiltrate the poems and how these tributaries of knowing help create new metaphors, connections and patterns in multispecies story-telling between humans and fungi.