critically analyse
Order Description
you will analyse a set text, or a small range of texts, through following theories-Ecocriticism.
In this assignment students will be assessed on their critical engagement with unit and individually researched reading material, their undertaking of the task, their knowledge of theory, their critical and relational thinking and their use of academic writing conventions like structure, academic english and referencing.
You must cite a minimum of six academic sources, including at least three from unit reading and at least three that you have found independently. You are welcome to use more obviously.
*unit readers
-Peter Barry (2002) from ‘Ecocriticism’, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press
-Simon Estok (2009) ‘Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 16:2, Spring, 203-225
-Val Plumwood (2009) ‘Nature in the Active Voice’, Australian Humanities Review, 46: May
MAS215 Theories of Writing for the Media
Essay 2 (2000 words)
Due 5pm Friday 31st October (Week 11)
Answer one of the following questions.
You must cite a minimum of six academic sources, including at least three from the MAS215 unit reader and at least three that you have found independently. You are welcome to use more obviously.
Your essay must be uploaded to Turnitin and a hard-copy submitted to W6A.
Marking criteria: You will be marked against the following criteria in this major essay:
Does the essay show sufficient critical engagement with the relevant readings from the MAS215 unit reader?
Does the essay show critical engagement with independently sourced and appropriately academic publications?
Does the essay stay focused on the question? Does the essay do what the question asks?
Does the essay show a knowledge and understanding of the theory? Does the essay identify appropriate concepts & theorists?
Does the essay demonstrate critical and analytical thinking?
Does the essay demonstrate relational thinking? Does the essay make connections between the set text and the theory, and to other relevant ideas and information?
How well does the essay use academic research to support the analysis?
Essay writing skills: essay structure, paragraphing, sentence structure, clarity of expression etc.
Appropriate and accurate referencing (in-text citation and list of references).
Q.2 Critically analyse ‘Going Alone in Wilderness for Self-Renewal’ (Anonymous 2014) and Les Murray’s ‘Cows on Killing day’ (from Subhuman Redneck Poems 1997) from an ecocritical perspective. You may like to discuss such ecocritical concerns as the nature/culture binary, anthropocentrism, ecocentrism and environmental activism etc., in your comparative analysis.
Anonymous (2014)
‘Going Alone in Wilderness for Self-Renewal’
(http://www.travel-soul-therapy.com/alone_in_wilderness.html: accessed 6/9/14)
Going alone in wilderness was used as practice for spiritual rejuvenation and clarity throughout human history by many historic figures. Depending on personal development and readiness, some reported experiences of luminous clairvoyance, state of oneness and intense transformation. There are plentiful examples of Jesus of Nazareth, Sakyamuni Buddha, Tibetan yogi Milarepa, Greek Orthodox monk Saint Simeon, David Thoreau and great number of others throughout history that used time alone in the wilderness as a way to clarify meaning of existence, to connect to the source of happiness within and shine a light on a path of individual evolution of consciousness.
Going along in wilderness gives a variegated experience of space. Our habitually internalized relationship with our immediate environment has a tendency to subconsciously retrain our ability to envision new perspective on out universe and our place in it. Going into wilderness alone has a potential for a new possibility to see yourself in the world. External environment has a direct effect on our sense of well-being. As our mind makes sense of it internally through relational cognition. External space is a reflection of a space of the mind, which is experienced as awareness within which all appearances arise. “The environment and experiences change our brain, so who you are as a person changes by virtue of the environment you live in and experiences you have”.
Fred Gage, Neuroscientist — Sulk University at La Jolla, California.
BENEFITS FROM GOING ALONE IN WILDERNESS
Open more space for Life.
Going alone in wilderness with intention of nurturing yourself and opening to reality of inner experience as much as outer terrain will result in perceptual shifts. Spaciousness of outer expanse experienced by being alone in the wilderness will translate into softening of the edges of rigid self-perception and conceptual definition of personal reality and your place in the Universe. It may result in greater open-mindedness and more magnanimous attitude toward yourself and others. If you come away from a place of conflict or stagnation in not finding solution to whatever problem, being alone in wilderness may initiate a change. By nature of shifting environment it may cause you to abandon ardent attachment to focus on problematic position and let unexpected solution come. Our perception, which is governed by mental habits might shift along with a change in vastness and serene stability of a landscape. It will affect your interaction within yourself by the way of slowing your mind down to let it rest in its natural state devoid of input for habitual reactivity.
When this happens you may see others in a slightly different light, more like diverse flow of events and not like single snapshots you chose them to see. It will give rise to mental spaciousness and tolerance.
There is a new branch of neuroscience specifically aimed at study of malleability of the brain, called Neuroplasticity. What long-believed to be true that brain formation is finished in early childhood was proven otherwise by researchers at Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, California.
They show that the adult brain can change its structure, its connections and functions. Which meant that we can voluntarily transform our experience, by changing our minds and brains through the choice of environment, way of life and mental activity we engage in. Enriched environments experiment on rats at the same university showed that by placing lab animals in rooms with play and exercise equipment gave rise to neurogenesis — an increase and survival of new neurons.
It was a striking discovery that exposure to an enriched environment leads to increase in new neurons by 15% along with improvement in behavioral performance
Get Unstuck.
Going alone in wilderness for mental health has a positive effect of removing mental static, which is seeing yourself stuck in a particular situation. We get ourselves stuck by firmly believing and identifying with our particular mental construct of fragments of reality into a concrete view. Identifying with our view of life as truly existent reality, completely solid and unchangeable gets us stuck.
Going in wilderness alone may help to loosen up our attachment to our version of reality, our universe by offering an opportunity to quiet the mind and notice the stream of thoughts and emotions from a standpoint of neutral observer. It might happen through deliberate use of meditative technique or by being removed from environment that re-enforces our habitual way of being.
This is the opening into awareness – nature of who you are. Power of awareness is such that it is liberating from self-imposed limitations. The effect of the awareness on your thoughts, emotions and desires is detachment. You begin to observe emotions and thoughts as events passing through and not an intrinsic quality of yourself. You are not identical to these mental activities. As rigid structure of perceiving yourself and your relationship to circumstances in a particular way begins to soften up, there is an opening to become free to move forward.
HEALING PRACTICES FOR BEING ALONE IN WILDERNESS
By the nature of simply being removed from continuous information input of ordinary life and going alone into the wilderness, there are naturally arising methods for gaining mental balance, awareness and sense of well-being.
Silence Practice.
Being alone in wilderness is naturally infused with opportunity for silence. In silence, there is a possibility to hear your inner dialogue and notice the quality of relationship you have with yourself. In silence of being alone in nature, there is a possibility to slow down and watch your mind and all its activity with detachment and realize your freedom from preoccupation with its contents.
Walking Meditation.
Being alone in nature offers a great chance for self-awareness through alert attention to your contact with earth, landscape and your body response to it. Walking meditation is about using movement of your feet and their contact with surface for bringing your mind into a present moment. Walking with focused attention on the manner of your body movement can lead to a sense of great relief from stress rising from obsession with bad memories, negative future fantasies and worries.
Sky Gazing.
There is plenty of open sky usually available to cast your gaze. Method of settling the mind through non-conceptual gazing into the sky avails a possibility to experience deeper level of consciousness. The power of open awareness or settling your mind in its natural state results in increased capacity for focused attention and sense of well-being arising from presence in the “now-ness”. It is experienced by looking into the space of the sky without particular focus while internally observing and allowing all thoughts, desires, fantasies and emotions appear and disappear on their own accord, like clouds in the space of the sky without affecting it.
Going alone in wilderness has a vast potential for inner transformation and spiritual regeneration. However it needs to be done with preparation for safety, provisions and some knowledge of survival in the wilderness.
***
Les Murray
‘The Cows on Killing Day’ (1997)
Subhuman Redneck Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York
All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.
All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still
from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths
that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.
All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me.
One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me,
the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light
and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me.
Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me.
Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull.
The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human
bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor,
big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass,
that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud.
She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll
and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats.
The heifer human smells of needing the bull human
and is angry. All me look nervously at her
as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy
of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.
Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.
One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.
Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now,
licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming.
Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human
and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down
with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.
Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.
All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky
that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood
in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree
is with the human. It works in the neck of me
and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar,
some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror.
The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human!
But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me.
Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.
All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,
and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.
The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf,
is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter,
and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky.
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