The Interdisciplinary Rhetoric of Ecocriticism and the Reinterpretation of The Tisza by Sándor Petőfi

Abstract

Ecocriticism is a new trend in the humanities which allows the interdisciplinary approach of literature involving not only sibling areas of study but those of the „hard” sciences as well. A good example of this dialogue is the utiliza112 tion of certain terms that used to be applied by natural or social scientists, like „ecosystem”, „niche”, „sustainability”, which seem to be at first sight only the symptoms of current fashion, but may also invite special, unusual viewpoints in the approach of literary (or other cultural) products. The present paper attempts to demonstrate this via the interpretation of a very well known and appraised Hungarian poem The Tisza written by Sándor Petőfi in which the newly fashionable term „tipping point” is used to highlight new angles of the work of art. In this approach the „tipping point” is seen as an invisible focal point of the poem that connects not only the flood of the eponymous river and the coming revolution of 1848 augurated by the poet, but also the socialeconomical antecedents of the revolution and the plans for the regulation of the river bed that began at the time when the poem was written. When analysing these connections, the celebrated rhetoric of the poem is demonstrated to involve not only formal and superficial similarities between the land and the social situation of its politically oppressed inhabitants, but is shown to reflect on the economical and power relations they are equally embedded in and determined by.