Some Ecological Issues In a Few Luigi Pirandello's Short Stories

Abstract

The research starts from the theory of environmental literary criticism and it uses its methodology in the analysis of some Luigi
Pirandello's short stories. In a literary text, the ecocriticism analyzes the hierarchical order imposed by the centennial dictatorship of
some members of the „vertical“ society. This order also inevitably includes some outcast elements which become marginalized by the
policy of centralism, and the ecocriticism methodology permits the reader to concentrate on these elements. If we try to conceive the
concept of the world not exclusively anthropocentric, it means that a man should interact with the nature, which will lead to the horizontal
vision of the society. In this work the focus is on the Pirandello's characters which are described as marginalized, exposed to the
atrocities of the social and moral extermination. These characters are assigned the roles of victims, since subject to the discriminatory
mechanism. The analysis aims to research whether in Pirandello's literary texts it is possible, by applying the ecocritical methods, to
regain the balance among the characters and to equalize all the members of „Pirandello's literary society“.