WEAKNESS, LAMENESS AND VEERING. ON THE PRACTICAL DIMENSIONS OF THEORIES OF ECOCRITICSM

Abstract

The article reviews some recent developments in ecocritical discourses. It briefly overviews the discipline from the point of view of weak thinking and comments on Timothy Morton‟s hyperobjects, a notion which results in what he calls “the state of weakness and lameness for human beings”. This position is contextualised within the claims of Object-Oriented Ontology to demonstrate how - using Nicholas Royle's notion of veering - such ecothinking, while drawing on literary discourses, uses a weakened, non-anthropocentric position to offer an alternative to the standard „strong‟ mode of thinking and writing about the environment, to take it beyond didacticism, guilt and threat.