Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice by Terry Gifford (review)

2 0 6 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 Reconnecting with John M uir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice. By Terry Gifford. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. 201 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Jeffrey M athes M cCarthy Westminster College, Salt Lake City, Utah Reconnecting with John Muir is an unusual book by a prominent ecocritic. Terry Gifford hikes us through a dozen chapters and three appendices, and readers will approve or disapprove to the extent they feel the whole walk is more than the sum of its steps. Gifford argues that the multiple subjectivities of postmodern experience that so irritate some Green scholars are, in fact, an opportunity for ecocritics to embrace the multiplicity— to be scholar, teacher, critic, creative writer, climber, and environmentalist. Gifford’s book enacts these multiple positions, and it is exactly this variety that readers will either embrace as liberating or disdain as schizophrenic. This book is a revolutionary effort to reimagine scholarly practice and the intellectual fruit of that toil. John Muir is an appropriate focal point for Gifford’s attention since Muir “reintegrated the separate career paths of his time as a scientist, poetic popular writer, and activist” (13). Implicit in Muir’s writing is faith in interconnection, and at the heart of Gifford’s Reconnecting with John Muir is the desire to improve higher education by showing us all an image of holistic practice. Does it succeed? Again, your answer will depend on how well you think the chapters hang together. The principle of construction is chapters of tradi­ tional scholarship— biography, close reading of Muir, close readings of Rick Bass and Charles Frazier— stitched together with Gifford’s own poetry and sewn as securely to other chapters on pedagogical practice and, of course, the awakening of environmental conscience. Thus the work’s subtitle— Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice— is an apt description of the author’s process. The whole endeavor benefits from Gifford’s careful touch as a writer and his trans-Atlantic perspective. To me, the apparently diffuse chapters actually bond through the project’s unifying assertion that these disparate professional roles can be under­ stood as symbiotic. Gifford is best known for his book Pastoral (1999), and in that tidy volume, he argues most directly for the theory of “post-pastoral” that shapes the present work. If you keep Leo Marx’s pastoral theorizing in mind, post-pastoral is easy to grasp: “literature that escapes the closed circuit of the idealized pastoral and the anti-pastoral corrective that has challenged it” (30). I like Gifford at his most polemical, and in spots he’s willing to skewer American nature writing as “ossi­ fied” and prescribe the post-pastoral as a tonic for readers and writers both. Not surprisingly, Muir is advanced as an avatar of this post-pastoral ideal. The focus on Muir and Gifford’s effort to theorize the role of mountaineering itself reminds me of Michael Cohen’s fine Muir study, The Pathless Way (1984). The desire BO O K R E VIE W S 2 0 7 for outcomes— for practical applications of scholarly ideas— echoes William Rueckert’s work and, more recently, Glen Love’s Practical Ecocriticism (2003). Reconnecting withJohn Muir offers professors a new and empowering way to think about our own multiple roles. What’s distinctive here is Gifford’s celebra­ tion of the multiplicity scholars generally experience as a dissonant avalanche of competing obligations, but that they could live as a unifying ecosystem of oppor­ tunities. Like Muir’s own Yosemite, readers can visit this book for many reasons and, whether on a short visit or a full expedition, come away enlightened. D . H. Lawrence in New Mexico: “ The Time Is Different There.” By Arthur ]. Bachrach. Albuquerque: University of New M exico Press, 2006. 120 pages, $15.95. Reviewed by Earl Ganz University of Montana, Professor Emeritus D. H. Lawrence in New Mexico is a short, densely packed work detailing D. H. and Frieda Lawrence’s sojourn in America, which began in September of...