Easterlin likewise asserts in her ' Cognitive Ecocriticism ' that ' the dynamic between human social relationships and physical places ' can be understood through ' literary representations ' towards those nonhuman environments (2010, p. Such readings and approaches facilitate us to enhance the core activity of literary studies, literary interpretation, as well as our general understanding of literature's function. In their Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, they support us even to explore the advantage of ecocritical approaches to the texts associated with metropolitan settings and ' far 'beyond nature writing' ' as those of Henry James which are mostly related to European gathering salons and drawing rooms (Wallace & Armbruster, 2001, p. Wallace and Karla Armbruster, for example, push well beyond that established framework. The approach which remained – until recently – closely focused on critical analyses of nature writing and literature of wilderness over the past decade received more attentions afterwards. Literary Ecology and Paul Bowles Simply defined, literary ecology – as emerged in 1980s (in the USA) and 1990s (in the UK) – is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment and exploration of the ways that writing both reflects and influences our interactions with the natural world (Glotfelty & Fromm, 1996). Accordingly we may wrap up that the environment bears a direct impact on our understanding of it. Consequently we come to know that Bowles's own knowledge and awareness of the same environments left traces in his work. In the novel the actual environment becomes in some ways pale and covert under the psyche of the writer. The desert also projects an apocalyptic vision in the struggle between the West and the East and the Sahara becomes in fact a Conradian Heart of Darkness, an Eliotian Waste Land, and a Sartrean No Exit.

The boundless desert acts here as a metaphor and the journey symbolizes one's own journey into the depth of his/her soul. The Sheltering Sky is an encounter with the Sahara, not only the physical one but the desert of moral nihilism into which one may wander blindly. His fiction mostly focuses on American expatriates travelling in exotic locations. Bowles is an American writer and a composer who is undoubtedly the most arresting example of cross-cultural influence concerning a Western author and the Middle East and North Africa. This paper attempts to show that an ecocritical reading of Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky (1949) helps one in better understanding of this novel of post-colonial alienation and existential despair. Landscapes are not simply something objective and unchallenged out there but the work of the mind made by the strata of memory.

The sheltering sky book summary