Ecocriticism, as a newly-arising critical method, "explores the ways in which we imagine and portray the relationship between humans and the environment in all areas of cultural production." In the context of ecocriticism, degrowth became a more and more important narrative discourse in eco-literature. "Degrowth is a rejection of the illusion of growth and a call to repoliticize the public debate colonized by the idiom of economism. It is a project advocating the democratically-led shrinking of production and consumption with the aim of achieving social justice and ecological sustainability." Many environmental literary works feature the topic of degrowth. Joyce Carol Oates's The Falls is one of them. In this novel, Oates interweaves the fictional story with the real-life environmental scandal occurring in American history, mercilessly exposing the ecological crisis resulted from industrialization, expressing her worry about unbalanced ecology and her critique to developmentalism in American society, and also expressing her optimism to achieve sustainable development in future.
