| Summary: | 博士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系博士班 === 100 === Both local and global disasters lead me to brood over the contentious issue of how to live in harmony with the natural world. Tracing from the traditional worldviews of the East and the West through the human-nature relationship to an individual’s sense of place, this study attempts to take an ecocritical approach to justify that sense of place is integral to the shaping of self-identity and the pursuit of a sustainable lifestyle. The close bond between place and identity is illustrated by scholars in different disciplines from both traditional and postmodern perspectives. Between the two poles of the spectrum I strive to sketch out a middle ground with home as the nexus in the center of a concentric circle, from which a sense of place and selfhood is developed and then extended to a wide array of mobile sense of places and multiple identities. Based on the theoretical grounding established in the first chapter, this dissertation follows the syllogism of nature, culture, and a symbiosis of both. Chapter Two deals with Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms which demonstrates the thesis of the traditional value of nature as embodied in an individual’s sense of place, which is essential to the feelings of belonging, security, well-being, and identity. Chapter Three treats Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange as the antithesis of nature, which foregrounds the metropolitan culture of a globalized society with displaced people devoid of sense of place or identity. In response to the preceding thesis and antithesis, Frances Mayes’s Under the Tuscan Sun is investigated as the synthesis in Chapter Four in that a symbiosis of nature and culture provides a middle ground for the rejuvenation of personal integrity and the experiment of a congenial lifestyle. This dissertation concludes with the proposition that the cultivation of an ecological identity is indispensable not only to the pursuit of a sustainable lifestyle but also to the protection of a local/global ecosystem.
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