Department of English, NCCU

Class Lecture

Lecturer: Dr. Kao Pei-Wen (Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Ilan University）

Topic: Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Toward a Paradigm Shift of American Nature Writing (2022/4/18)

Time: April 18 (Mon.) 13:10~16:00

Venue: Research Bldg. 250203

Abstract:

Ecofeminism has posed as an eco-conscious as well as gender-oriented practice of literary criticism ever since its emergence in the 1980s.  It adroitly combines the concerns of ecocriticism and feminism, making an agenda to undermine the domination of both nature and women by the patriarchy.  In the field of literary criticism, ecofeminism serves to reimagine the representation of nature and/as women in literary works, especially those represented in the canonical writings of white male authors.  We shall look closely at the traditional nature writings by the well-established writers of the American Renaissance period, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  We shall make an ecofeminist criticism of these nature writings of Romanticism, which treats nature as a soothing, loving, but silent mother figure for the knowing and dominant males to retreat to.  On the other hand, we will read the extracts from several contemporary women writers -- Ursula Le Guin, Alice Walker, Diane Ackerman, etc. -- whose works on nature are beyond the hierarchical and dominating frames of the patriarchal ideology.

Bio:

Pei-Wen Clio Kao is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature of National Ilan University, Taiwan (R.O.C.).  Her research specialty lies in Conrad Studies, Faulkner Studies, and Literary Modernism.  She completed her Ph.D. from National Chengchi University, Taiwan, in 2015.  She did overseas studies in Connecticut University (USA) as an exchange graduate student and was a visiting scholar at the Center for Faulkner Studies in the Southeast Missouri State University (USA). She has published articles on Modernism, Conrad and Faulkner in international journals and in international book series.