Customer Reviews

Ecocriticism (The New Critical Idiom)

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This is one of the best New Critical Idiom titles: well-organized, clearly written, balanced and thoughtful, both comprehensive and comprehensible. If you need an introduction to the field of ecocriticism, this is the best place to start.

Contrary to what the previous reviewer claims, the book has well-informed discussions of both Christianity (in a chapter on Apocalypse, where he contrasts millenialist visions of the end of the world with Augustine's "comic" (i.e. unpredictable) eschatology) and of various eco-feminist and deep-ecological ideas of the Great Mother. Garrard is a generous reader, but does not hesitate to point out excesses and contradictions. His distinction between "problems in ecology" (which call for scientific analysis) and "ecological problems" (requiring social and cultural understanding) is worth the price of the book.

I got this book not expecting much. As I've seen it the ecocriticism field is just as rotten through with poor thought as most fields of literary criticism. But the book turned out to puncture many ecopieties and call into question almost every preconception but two.

One is that Christianity is destructive of the earth. Yes, he left that unquestioned on the table. The earth is a gift from God so to not respect it or to trash it as this book implies is just purely wrong for Christians.

Second, that matriarchy is a good thing. The notion of a primitive matriarchy that preexisted patriarchy is shaky and based on wish-fulfillment. The very definition of matriarchy is hard to pin down, and doesn't turn out to mean anything. Feminist scholars have turned the idea upside down and inside out and find that it's largely a 70s feminist idea that is based purely on the essentialism of that era.

But those are small blemishes. The prose is sharp, and the ideas are otherwise fairly sound throughout the book. There is a great bibliography, and many new ideas. It is also fairly simple and easy to read. I only had to look up one word.

I recommend this book to anyone who would like an overview of ecocriticism. Not only does this book provide that, it provides a fairly sound drubbing to most of ecocriticism. At 20 dollars this book is a very sound investment. It's probably the best book of literary criticism I've read in a long time. I'm glad I have it. I'm going to read it two or three times. The mind here is playful and expansive and erudite. Couldn't ask for anything more.

This is cultural criticism, but it isn't really ecocriticism, nor is it an accurate representation of the field.

Most of this book is an engagement with environmental politics, which Garrard handles well enough. One reviewer is correct in that the book "punctures certain ecopieties," but sadly it doesn't represent ecocriticism's soundness beyond those pieties. Therefore, we get a reviewer praising it for simply affirming his distates for some brand of environmental politics, rather than for better articulating the field of literary criticism through an ecological lens. "Ecological" means "through the application of ecology." Garrard often misses this, indeed missing the very core of the discipline while purporting to represent it.

The New Critical Idiom books are often oddball constructs. They tend to be written by theorizers and cultural critics whose issue orientation causes them to skip over the basic tenets of a discipline and riff on the fringes. For instance, Garrard wastes a considerable amount of the "Animals" chapter on a Philip K. Dick novel and the nonsense of Andrew Ross and Donna Haraway regarding "cyborgs," along with other pop culture choices, rather than focusing on strong literature incorporating animals and critics that seriously analyzed it--which would have actually represented ecocriticism.

If you want to read ecocriticism, then I recommend reading Glen Love, Thomas J. Lyon, Don Scheese, and Cheryll Glotfelty, among a few others. Or just read the essays of the best nature writers, who are often better readers than so-called theorists are, and who have put their boots on the ground.

Mainly, what you want to look for is ecocriticism that actually *analyzes literature*. That's ostensibly why ecocriticism is populated by English professors. Sadly, English professors have lost their way, collectively speaking. And ecocriticism is hard to really describe if you're using only an urban campus map.