Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures by Karen Laura Thornber (review)

Karen Thornber opens her book Ecoambiguity with a picture of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), which she designates as an "ecotopia," a space of the "most ecoambiguous phenomenon" in the Korean peninsula (76). Having been free from human settlement since the end of the Korean War in 1953, this heavily militarized border has paradoxically become home to numerous species of flora and fauna, many of which are elsewhere endangered. Thornber reads the ambiguous relationships between human beings and their biophysical environments into the picture and suggests that continued military operations have turned an ecological Eden at the DMZ site into a mere illusion. Ecoambiguity thus traces the contradictory and conflicting relationships between people and damaged ecosystems, thereby disclosing the discrepancies in human attitudes, behaviors, and information vis-à-vis the nonhuman environment.

Thornber utilizes the critical, methodological, and technical skills of a comparatist and an ecocritic to address the most pressing issues of environmental degradation in East Asia as well as in the global setting- pollution, deforestation, flooding, mud erosion, damming, overpopulation, safe disposal of nuclear and other toxic waste, species extinction, and climate change-issues often overlooked by Euro-American scholars. Thornber highlights the environmental crises in East Asia to expose myths about this region, which is noted for its celebration of natural beauty and harmony. Her analyses of texts from China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea invoke intercultural conceptual networks. Her vocabulary derives from the New Criticism: ambiguity, ambivalence, paradox, tension, and uncertainty. A gigantic project of 702 pages, the book should be credited for its close reading of several hundreds of texts from East Asia that engage with important issues extending beyond single cultures. More than one-third of the book is composed of notes and a most comprehensive bibliography, allowing it to qualify as an encyclopedia to ecocriticism and environmental studies. Thornber takes up poetry and fiction by East Asian writers who have been translated and celebrated around the world, including Gao Xingjian, Ishimure Michiko, Jiang Rong, and Ko Un, as well as works by minor contemporary East Asian authors. Both her thematic and conceptual exploration and the fact that she cites in the original languages and analyzes the stylistics widen the geographic and linguistic scope of ecocriticism and environmental studies, making this a book that will appeal to a wide audience, including environmental studies and comparative literature scholars, East and West, and those interested in environmental history and literature in the twenty-first century. With her careful textual analyses in an environmental, historical and transnational context, she develops a subfield in world literature and environmental studies, drawing on her translocal/transcultural/transnational as well as intraregional and global knowledge and sensibility. Consequently, in teasing out the contradictions inherent in literary discourses on environmental degradation, whether or not she brings new perspectives to ecocriticism, Thornber expands the fields of East Asian studies, comparative literature, environmental studies, and ecocriticism and enriches the canon of environment and literature studies.

In addition to an introduction, there are seven chapters in the book, organized into two parts. Chapter 1 offers the historical and literary background for the analyses in chapters two to seven. Thornber dismisses the stereotypes of East Asians as environmental custodians and of East Asian literatures as depicting only close relationships between people and the natural world. Her book pivots on environmental concepts based on various types of ecoambiguity in the texts from different East Asian traditions: ambivalence, uncertainty, contradiction, acquiescence, illusions and delusions, and paradoxes. The three chapters in part 1 examine how literature negotiates disjunctions in attitudes, in information, and in behaviors. Thornber focuses on conflicting psychologies accompanying environmental degradation, uncertainties and inconsistencies with respect to information about changes to ecosystems, and contradictory behaviors vis-à-vis environments. Part 2 (chapters 5 to 7) investigates how literature grapples with acquiescence to environmental degradation and with illusions and delusions concerning ecological conditions and the limitations and dangers of green rhetoric. Thornber's conceptualization of ecoambiguity calls into question the...