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Book Review
| Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Edited By Catrin Gersdorf and Sylvia Mayer. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. 490 pp. Notes, index. Cloth $130.00.
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| Ecocriticism entails an implicit critique of the notion that humans are separate from the nonhuman world (p. 239), a viewpoint that will be familiar to non-western scholars but needs scholarly affirmation in Europe and the Neo-Europes created by colonization, where this volume originates. In their introduction, the editors frame their aim as to be "a more rigorous investigation of nature, not as a concept that reinforces but one that challenges established cultural, political and ethical normativities" (p. 10). |
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Gersdorf and Mayer assembled twenty-two authors, almost equally divided in terms of gender. Contributors come mostly from Britain, Germany, and the United States. The book is divided into four parts. The five contributions to the first part, devoted to theorizing the nature of ecocriticism, offer an introduction to this field. Ecocriticism is contextualized by highlighting the role of thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. Christa Grewe-Volpp's essay on conceptions of nature is especially useful, as she delineates different concepts of nature, from nature as agent to nature as cultural construction. The essays of the second part locate nature in language, literature, and everyday life. Christian Krug's essay on virtual tourism includes a section on landscape consumption in computer games, which cleverly sets them in a comparative framework, and Tonia Payne discusses short stories of space travel by Ursula K. Le Guin. One, "Newton's Sleep," refers to William Blake, and hence to a historically very interesting period, but neither Le Guin nor Payne provide historical context. The third part of the book, devoted to nature's role in nationalisms, offers interesting takes on the role of nature in literature written in inner exile and exile proper, and particularly welcome, an essay on a Lithuanian émigré by Irena Ragaišien. The last part of the book contains three essays on the ethics of nature, of which Thomas Claviez's analysis of ecocentric and anthropocentric ethics of nature protection is more accessible to the non-specialist than the other two pieces. In the end, as with many edited volumes, one is left unsure if the book does indeed challenge established cultural, political, and ethical normativities. It does surely contain several very useful contributions to the debate on such normativities. |
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Historians will find the postmodern, highly referential style of some of the essays thick reading, but the themes explored and the perspectives offered are valuable contributions. Lawrence Hazelrigg's lucid Cultures of Nature of 1995 is curiously absent as a reference. Environmental historians, however have devoted thoughts to questions addressed in this book as well. Apart from Leo Marx, none of these writers (Roderick Nash, Richard White, Ted Steinberg, Donald Worster, Arthur McEvoy, to name but the most obvious) is mentioned in the index. There is a sad gap between literary scholars and historians. Some of the essays in this volume could help interested environmental historians to overcome it. Laudably, the book has an index of names making it useful for reference. It should find an audience despite the forbidding price. |
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Verena Winiwarter is professor for environmental history at Klagenfurt University's faculty for interdisciplinary studies in Vienna, Austria. She served as president of the European Society for Environmental History from 2000–2005. |
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