| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. By Lawrence Buell. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. x, 365 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-00449-3.)

In this major new book, Lawrence Buell demonstrates that ecocriticism is a practice of reading. Buell posits an "environmental unconscious," alluding to Fredric Jameson's influential formulation of "the political unconscious." If Jameson's injunction is "always historicize," then Buell's is "always ecologize," that is, attend to the way in which humans and their imaginative texts are embedded in their environments, whether natural or built. Departing from his magisterial The Environmental Imagination (1995), a broadly based ecocritical history of American literature in the Thoreauvian tradition, Buell here shows how an ecocritical approach can be brought to bear on the literature of built environments as well as natural ones. 1

The first chapter looks at the ecological awareness of "toxic discourse." This awareness of toxicity functions for the environmental unconscious as an ecological primal scene, a starting point for the development of more complex forms of environmental awareness. The second chapter suggests that a corollary feature of the environmental unconscious is an awareness of "place"; toxic discourse is inconceivable without a sense of place to which toxicity could be seen to pose a threat. . . .

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