- Environmental Practice and Early American Literature by Michael Ziser
One of ecocriticism’s ongoing projects has been the attempt to move us from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric worldview. Within the past decade or so, ecocritics have found theoretical ground for this moral imperative in science studies and developments in contemporary philosophy—for example, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, which proposes to dismantle modernity’s nature-culture binary and reassemble the world as configurations of quasi-objects for political deliberation; “flat” ontologies such as Graham Harman’s object oriented ontology, which reject Kantian correlationism and place all objects (including gods, if they exist) on an equal ontological footing; or “agential realism” as theorized by Karen Barad, which in scaling up quantum physics holds that objects exist only through interactions. Yet in following this turn, prominent ecocritics such as Stacy Alaimo or Timothy Morton (Michael Ziser’s former colleague at the University of California, Davis) have often been drawn away from literature, or in any case from pre-postmodern literature. Compare, for example, the scope of Alaimo’s ecofeminist readings of nineteenth-century American fiction (Undomesticated Ground, 2000) to that of her more recent agential-realist work in contemporary cultural studies (Bodily Natures, 2010). In Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), Morton continues to name-check the British romantic poets who were the subjects of his early work, but they no longer seem to sustain his attention in the same way.
From its roots in nineteenth-century wilderness veneration through the recent ontological turn, the ecocentric imperative has been a largely pastoral project (Latour’s influence excepted) focused on questions of perception and contemplation—as for example the approach to the world that [End Page 278] Morton takes from object oriented ontology: “meditation” and “simple letting-be” (198). Ziser by contrast asks us to consider the implications of the ontological turn for the georgic mode. Chapters are devoted to the literature of tobacco, with particular notice of King James I’s Counterblaste (1604); the staple colony georgic, with close attention to James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764); literary manifestations of the apple in New England from the first stanza of Anne Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” through Edward Taylor and Jonathan Edwards to Henry David Thoreau’s A Week (1849) and his posthumous “Wild Apples”; literary manifestations of bees, focusing on one of James Fenimore Cooper’s problematic late romances, The Oak-Openings (1848); and Thoreau’s debt to classical georgic in Walden (1854), with a brief coda on the rise of the nineteenth-century agricultural press. If later chapters belie the title’s claim of “early” (at least for readers of this journal), the demarcation makes sense because it was during the mid-nineteenth century that the ontology that Latour, Harman, Barad et al. seek to undo—“the pastoralist understanding of the natural world as inert backdrop” for human culture—came to dominance (21).
The book’s most important contribution is an attempt to analyze the effects of nonhuman nature on literary texts, a project that is more central to some chapters than to others. Ziser posits that the characteristic differentiating ecocriticism from all other methodologies is “a willingness to entertain the possibility that some ‘human’ cultural productions do not belong solely to human individuals or societies but in real and specifiable ways to a more-than-human community of humans and nonhuman others” (10). It is one thing for object oriented ontology to assert that human and nonhuman matter exist on equal ontological footing. It is another to show how nonhuman agency is exerted through humanist productions, especially literary texts, which as reproducible sets of signs can seem insubstantial, unbound from any particular environment. The confluence of ecocriticism and book-history methodologies could provide one approach to this problem. Eric Slauter’s current work in progress, for example, asks, What is Walden’s carbon footprint? Ziser concentrates rather on the impact of the nonhuman on rhetorical and literary form. He does so not via the indirect routes of evolutionary psychology (e.g., Glen Love...