Greg Garrard, who’s become something of a point-man for synoptic treatments of ecocriticism (like this one, and see my previous post on him), has come out with a lucid and judicious review of recent publications in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. It covers the years 2007-8, which Garrard, in an email to the ASLE listserv, calls “an exceptionally good couple of years for ecocriticism.” An uncorrected draft version of the review can be read on Greg’s academia.edu page.
It’s a commendable effort to make some sense out of the various approaches one finds in the field. Parsing things into categories is always tricky, and Garrard’s first paradigm, “Normal Science,” is probably the cleanest cut: referring to the “backpacker school of criticism,” this section highlights work by Scott Slovic (Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility) and David Whitley (The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation). This is “established practice,” the dominant paradigm as it were, and the fact that so few pages are expended on it while so many describe four “rivals” tells us exactly how paradigmatically unsettled the field is.
The second classification, “Re-Enchantment,” highlighted here through work by the late Val Plumwood, Patrick Curry, and Anthony Lioi, among others, covers a good swath of fairly traditional (by now) ecocritical writing as well, arguably taking us back to the proto-ecocriticisms of Theodore Roszak, Neil Evernden, and their Romantic forebears. Only with the third section does a sharply announced new paradigm threaten to appear on the horizon. “Against Nature” covers Tim Morton, Dana Phillips, queer ecology, animal studies, posthumanism, and more. That may be too much for a single term to carry, however, especially if the signifier “nature” is seen to be more or less interchangeable with a series of others (ecology, environment, land, etc.), as it tends to be in common usage. In amidst some praise, Garrard reserves some of his strongest barbs for Morton’s Ecology Without Nature, of which he writes,
