Ecosublime: Environmental Awe and Terror from New World to Oddworld by Lee Rozelle (review)

2 0 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 7 Wave science fiction and of cyberpunk and a new generation of writers who consciously integrate the ongoing dialectic about western frontiers into their complex projections of the future. As Abbott observes about his book’s design, it reconstructs earlier discus­ sions through the perspectives of contemporary literary and cultural studies and current historiography. “The organization of the book mirrors both the Turnerian sequence and the complicating arguments of recent historians” (32). Thus, his chapter titles provide a kind of historiography of future histories inter­ woven with aesthetic assessments of the stories they inspire. From an introduc­ tion titled “Launching Pads,” we proceed to examine “Never Final Frontiers,” and literal, new, physical frontiers in chapters such as “Beyond Alaska: Sourdoughs, Lunies, Belters, and Other Tough Guys” and “Johnny Appleseed, John Wayne, and Homesteading on the Extraterrestrial Frontier.” He examines thematic frontiers such as “Frontier Democracy” and “On the Urban Edge” and informational and virtual frontiers in “Information Everywhere: Pacific Destinies in the Twenty-First Century.” Artfully weaving connections between history and fiction, cultural theory and aesthetics, Frontiers Past and Future should provide food for thought to any­ one interested in genuinely interdisciplinary studies. Science fiction has often been misconceived to be simply speculative prediction in fictional form, but more fundamentally it functions as extrapolative cultural metaphor. This study demonstrates how apparently separate traditions mirror each other’s central themes and how stories of the past and future can enrich our understanding of the present. It has often been observed that we can’t know where we are without knowing how we got here. Perhaps it’s equally true, in this era of future shock, that scouting out where we’re going requires that we first envision new terrain that does not exist. E cosublime: Environm ental Awe and Terror from New World to Oddworld. By Lee Rozelle. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. 134 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Nicholas Lawrence Texas A&M University, College Station In Ecosublime, Lee Rozelle challenges the “detached posture” of Green criti­ cism as currently practiced in the academy, arguing that “we must unlock the constructionist’s cage” of language and culture and “remember a wider range of human links to the outside” (2). Interrogating representations of ecological space from a striking gamut of media, Rozelle’s book identifies a post-Burkean “ecosublime” whereby literary figures become shocked into apprehending their essential inextricability from the ecological spaces they inhabit. Such literary apprehension, Rozelle argues, can lead audiences to more sensible engagements with the natural environment. Throughout, Rozelle juxtaposes works that fully B o o k R e v ie w s realize ecological apprehension against those which, while falling well short of the ecosublime mark, nevertheless stand out in their potential for catalyzing audiences “to perceive their world anew” (7). Chapter 1, for example, examines two representatives of nineteenth-century frontier literature, contrasting the depletionism of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Journal ofJulius Rodman (1840) with the ecological integrations underpinning Isabella Bird’s A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879). Though Poe’s use of nature-loving discourse thinly veils a mindset shaped by commodification, Rozelle identifies several moments where Rodman’s rhetoric of sublimity allows readers inroads into connecting with surrounding ecologies. In contrast to Poe’s protagonist, Bird’s narrator deconstructs the region’s isolate mining culture by threading her narrative with epiphanic moments allowing literary figures to experience interconnection to the broader ecological whole. Having established these textual categories, Rozelle then expands upon them. Joining the instructive ecological failures of Poe’s Journal are Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), Salem cigarette packages, and John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy: The Monster Movie (1979). At the same time, Rozelle identifies ecosublimity in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) and Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills (1861), arguing these works shock read­ ers into associating ecological depletionism with their own dehumanization. Williams Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1963), Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir: The...