Man and Nonhuman Environment: Towards an Ecocritical Reading of J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K

Abstract

The advent of ecological paradigm in literary studies is significant in our age of globalization and environmental degradation which is the result of the domination of anthropocentric values. The lack of sign of an environmental standpoint in concurrent literary arena would seem to hint that despite its "revisionist energies" (Glotfelty xv), scholarship remains academic in the nuance of scholarly to the point of being environmentally unconscious of the outside world. This study examines J. M. Coetzee's novel, Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the context of ecocriticism. Ecocritical reading attempts to negotiate man's relationship to non-human environment by using concepts of environmental consciousness, sense of place, and sustainable nostalgia. Much of environmental writing excludes 'home' as an environmental site and dismisses family that works on land.