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Book Review
| Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment. By Glen A. Love. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. viii + 213 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $49.50, paper $17.50.
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| Like environmental history in its relationship to its discipline, ecocriticism is environmental literary criticism. In Practical Ecocriticism, Love argues for sociobiologically informed criticism, and applies it to themes of place in Willa Cather, animals in Ernest Hemingway, and the ecological in William Dean Howells. Love presents his own work as an extension of accepted thought. However, there is more diversity in ecocriticism than Love represents. Beyond other ecocritics, Love argues that the natural sciences produce better knowledge than the humanities. |
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Yes, scientific findings about the environment should fuel concern for the environment. Reacting to the strong relativism fashionable in postmodern literary circles, Love argues that environmental problems are real and we need to acknowledge them. However, Love also states that the sciences produce knowledge that is not "just" another cultural construction, but that is fundamentally real in some sense that other knowledge is not (pp. 38–41). He argues that we should treat the knowledge produced in the sciences less critically than that produced in the humanities. |
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Unfortunately, Love's arguments against relativism follow sociobiologists rather than pragmatic philosophers. He quotes Dawkins, "Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite" (p. 45). Like these sociobiologists, Love imagines the physical sciences as producing truth that corresponds to reality rather than truth that comes to be accepted by a group. But the critical question is whether Love's approach makes good criticism. |
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Love's ecocriticism is interesting when centered in the formal and mythical traditions of literary criticism, but his use of science in criticism is disruptive. The examples illuminate the shortcomings of translating scientific findings directly into literature. The Hemingway chapter is the most satisfying piece of criticism. Love argues for the tragic in the development of environmental conscience, against Joseph Meeker's Burkean argument, in The Comedy of Survival (Scribner's, 1974), for the comedic form as appropriate to ecology. The criticism of Hemingway is biographic rather than literary, as the evidence is drawn from Hemingway's writing and life to judge Hemingway's development as a hunter and a person. |
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In the chapter on Cather, place, and human nature, Love's ecocriticism is disappointing. The relationship between humans and their places is inherently humanistic and scientific; it could be fertile ground to demonstrate interdisciplinary ecocriticism. Love devotes almost half the chapter to the claim that there is a dominant (scientific) approach to place and that it is phenomenological geography. Under this umbrella, Love attempts to gather Edmund Husserl, Gary Snyder, Yi-Fu Tuan, Lewis Mumford, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Kenneth Burke and others. This is unworkable. |
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In discussing Cather's work, Love applies genetic sociobiology as much as place theory. In one example, Love translates the humanistic "deep sense of his own human bonds" to the sociobiological "shared DNA" (p. 100). The argument Love makes here is that because race is not a genetic reality, we need no longer worry about the social reality of colonialism. This is an inappropriate reduction to the biological, and the use of science is anecdotal. |
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I am not convinced that sociobiology as Love applies it provides theory that I can act on, like gravity or global climate change. I distrust the claim that the natural defines either the good or the inevitable in humans. A good scientist would not argue for the wholesale or uncritical adoption of "science." The irony is that it is the humanities, not the sciences, that ought to provide us with normative guidance. |
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Tara Lynne Clapp is an assistant professor in community and regional planning at Iowa State University. She studies the rhetorics of environmental planning and policy. |
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