The Sublime, Nature and Race: The Ecological Trap and Reconstruction of the Sublime, and Its Significance: The Perspective of Minority Nationalities Ecocriticism
Abstract：Abstract: The intention of this study is to revisit, from ecocritical perspective, the critical concept of the sublime, a wide-ranging and far-reaching in western literary and artistic criticism, so as to fully reveal the complicated relationships between human mind, nature and race. The analysis shows that in the long history of its evolution, the sublime on the one hand overemphasizes the supernaturality of human mind, and on the other otherizes nature and dwarfs the colored people, the black in particular, whereby it is interwoven with “black/white”subjectivity. In the American history, it foreshadows and helps turn racism into the real institutions whereby endless racial trauma aimed at black people was produced. Sharing the superficial similarities, both the sublime and trauma are different from each other in nature with regard to their effects. In spite of the above-mentioned sad incidents, those ecological literature writers such as Emerson, Thoreau and Abbey have been ecologically revising and reconstructing it to get rid of naturism and racism inherent in it, and have succeeded in letting it go through ecological transformation. Now it has become “ the ecological sublime ” based on universal environmental justice, and plays an important role in the protection of non-human natural world.
Key words： The Sublime； minority nationalities ecocriticism； ecological trap; ecological reconstruction; ecological significance
