Writing for an Endangered World : Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond

Rating:
Summary: Reading Between the Lines into the New, New World
Review: Employing a crypto-academic style that is by turns baffling, enervating but often frequently stimulating, Buell puts modernists classics of literature through their paces through the optics of "environmental criticism," a movement of which he and a few others appear to be the primary practictioners (from what I can glean from the book, the bibliography and the liner notes).

For example, his environmental criticism of Moby Dick is really quite a marvelous way to re-imagine the Melville classic as a text in which the boundaries between the consciousnesses of whales and men are elided through Melville's sympathetic and candid reportage of the whaling expedition and his inclusion of chapters on whaling lore. He does another marvelous job on Faulkner's "The Bear" and the collection in which it originally appeared, noting that the narrator's description of the abandoned sawmills, the clear-cut forests and the resulting floods and related catastrophes create an emblematic context for the telling of the vexed, multi-layered story of the end of the Southern elitist hunting tradition through the agency of extractive industrialization. His reading of DeLillo's White Noise restores its enviromental concerns (the Airborne Toxic Event) to its rightful place at the forefront of the DeLillo's topos -- unlike many other recent readings which do not mention this theme. (Buell notes that such ommissions in what is rapidly becoming a touchstone work in the realm of cultural criticism is a disservice to the book and to DeLillo's environmental concerns demonstrated in his other works such as Underworld, a view that I entirely agree with: I was working at DeLillo's publisher at the time of White Noise's release, and it's publication happened to coincide with a real airborne toxic event in New Jersey, a happy coincidence which not only highlighted this imporant aspect of the work, but, happily for the publishers spurred sales of the book in its prescience.)

There are other interesting readings of notable works of fiction and non-fiction through the lens of environmental criticism as well. Too, the introductory chapters which examine the various types of "toxic" discourses and describe how they restrict how we think of our relationship to the natural and man-made worlds are quite good as well. So are the final chapters which deal with changing our conceptions of nature (once primary nature, now a second-hand, or second-nature, which he argues should include manmade enviroments as well). Here he also encourages using the idea of the watershed as an organizing principle of locality and the most appropriate frame of our environmental imagination -- not arbitrary boundaries placed on the landscape either in theory or in practice.

But as you might suspect from the above, Buell covers a lot of territory with this book. Perhaps this is because in advancing the notion of environmental criticism he feels compelled to treat a lot of areas than would normally be necessary in a more deeply populated field of criticism. Don't get me wrong. Just because there's a lot to chew over in this book, doesn't mean it's bad. Much of it quite good, in fact. For instance, Buell is very attentive and inventive in his readings of Whitman, Thoreau, Williams Carlos Williams, Joyce, et. al. He also includes a number of well-selected non-canonical works which illustrate his theses imaginatively. To summarize, good readings, an interesting, if too somtimess too diffuse programme, a defect which can be easily forgiven. Now if only the style was more "grounded."