• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.245-270
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• 2023

Many publications of ecocritical research papers and translations of ecocriticism occur in Vietnam in recent years. This paper examines ecocritical scholarly writing in Vietnam, understanding how it corresponds to-reflects and attends to-contemporary Vietnamese society and politics. Specifically, this paper contextualizes Vietnamese ecocriticism in contemporary social and political concerns-embodied in journalistic and administrative documents-about the modernity-oriented postcolonial nation-building of Vietnam. In revealing critiques of political and social degenerations implied in ecocritical writings in Vietnam, this paper suggests that the emergence of ecocriticism in present-day Vietnam indicates a recent "political turn." More importantly, such emergence reflects and engages with the continuing Marxist perspective of literature as an instrument for social criticism and cultural revolution in Vietnam. Vietnamese ecocritics bear the mission of prophets of the time, public educators, and soul engineers, writing is an act of engaging with and influencing reality. Writing (literary and scholarly) still forms an idealized ideological instrument in the struggles for national homogeneity and sovereignty and social democracy in present-day Vietnam.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.135-159
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• 2021

Thơ mới (Vietnamese New Poetry, 1932-1945) is a literary movement in colonial Vietnam that is broadly considered to have marked the modernization of Vietnamese literature. This paper examines depictions about natural disasters, ecological wounds, and about relationships between humans and nature in New Poetry, asking how those descriptions reflect social and political issues in colonial Vietnam. The paper argues that ecocriticism, developed in Western academy, brought to the New Poetry Movement new meanings, associated with a material world. That is the specific reality of colonial Vietnam in the early twentieth century, when the colonial modernization resulted in natural and social collapses in the area. This approach is especially significant, given that New Poetry is largely seen as the embodiment of the expansion of Western romanticism by Vietnamese scholars. Moreover, in examining Thơ mới (Vietnam) from perspective of ecocriticism, this paper extends the ecocritical approach to non-Western literatures. Specifically, although ecocriticism developed in the West, particularly in United States and England, it has become an effective approach to non-Western literatures, particularly since the early twentieth first century. In this context, Asian literatures, particularly Southeast Asian literatures, potentially offer ecocriticism new meanings, many of which are associated with local social and political conditions and histories.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.91-113
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• 2024

Since the last years of the twentieth century, the approach to children's literature from ecocriticism has been discussed in academic fora around the world, especially in the US and Europe. In Southeast Asia, with the foundation of the ASEAN Association of Environment and Literature in 2016, there have been scholarly discussions about the capacity of children's literature to enhance ecological awareness in the region. In Vietnam, since the early years of the 21st century, with the increasing reception of ecocriticism from outside, children's literary works have become the subject of ecocriticism. This article examines scholarly works approaching children's literature in Vietnam, pointing out how they elucidate messages about environmental education. By studying Vietnamese ecocritical scholarship of various types including research, commentaries, and criticism on children's literature, this article argues that ecological education is a prominent feature in the relationship between ecocriticism and children's literature in Vietnam. As such, Vietnamese ecocriticism of children's literature shares the prominent argument of international materials on children's literature and ecocriticism, particularly in Southeast Asia.