Ecocritical Exploration of Anita Desai’s The Artist of Disappearance

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Recommended: Indian classical literature

Admittedly, there are only a few novels in the history of Indian English Literature, which can be read ecocritically. In fact a serious concern with ecological balance seems to be lacking in earlier works though nature has been employed as an important backdrop against which the stories of these novels develop. The title novella of Anita Desai’s latest book, a trio of linked novellas entitled The Artist of Disappearance published in 2011, is one of a few literary works in which there is a concern for natural depletion taking place in today’s India. My endeavour in this paper is to study this novella through the lens of ecocriticism. Let us now analyze the term ecocriticism and then re-read the novella from ecocritical perspective.
As a distinctive critical approach to literature, ecocriticism was not inaugurated until late in the 1980s in the USA. ‘Green Studies’ is an alternative term for ecocriticism in the UK where this new approach to literature began in the early 1990s. It is appropriate here to stress that though ecocriticism as a separate discipline emerged in the 1990s, it is a fact that the relation between man and his physical environment had always been intriguing to literary critics. This interest can be explained in two ways.1.Man could realize in the last decade of the 20th century that the greatest problem of the 21st century would be the survival of the earth with all her living and non-living beings. 2. It is within some physical environment that man always exists and there can not be ‘is’ without ‘where’ as Lawrence Buell has put it. In fact man feels threatened in the ecologically degraded world. The last decade of 20th century clearly showed that man should do something to help the earth survive. Ecocriticism ...

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...a Road, Kashmere Gate, Delhi-
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7. Egan, Gabriel “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: The Unexpected Return of the Elizabethan
World, Picture” Literature Compass Vol. 1 Internet http:// www.literature-compass.com
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8. Estok, Simon C. “Shakespeare and Ecocriticism: An Analysis of ‘Home’ and ‘Power’ in
King Lear” AUMLA 103, May 2005.
9. Glotfelty, Cheryll and Fromm, Harold The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary
Ecology , University of Georgia Press, 1996.
10. Hopkins, G. M. “Inversnaid”, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins Ed. by Robert Bridges,
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11. Rueckert, William “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” IOWA
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