ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 offers Jungian literary criticism for climate change, the Anthropocene, ecocriticism and complexity theory. Jung contributes to ecocriticism by taking the three ways we understand nature: as totality, a binary with culture, and as spectacle, into making consciousness that can be incorporated into literary reading and writing via symbols. The Jungian psyche, as well as literature as a whole, and in genres, can all be regarded as evolutionary complex adaptive systems. Taking complexity into Jungian transdisciplinarity as Dionysian reveals literature, nature and psyche co-evolving in a way that fosters multiple connected realities: a unus mundus of oneness and multiplicity of being. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare and Cosmography by Joel Weishaus become literature of climate change with Jungian symbols that enact Nicolescu’s hidden third, weaving psyche into cosmos. Jung’s work in Answer to Job and in alchemy proves to be psychological ecology. Post-Jungians, Helene Shulman in Living at the Edge of Chaos and Jerome Bernstein in Living in the Borderland show bring Jung into complexity and chaos theory. Contemporary Jungian literary criticism is represented by The One Mind by Matthew A. Fike and Rinda West on alchemical gardening. Finally, The Ecocritical Psyche by Susan Rowland explores Jung’s ecocriticism.
