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  • The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place by Wendy Harding
  • O. Alan Weltzien
Wendy Harding, The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014. 243pp. Paper, $47.50; e-book, $47.50.

Wendy Harding, a British native who has lived in several US regions and spent most of her career in Toulouse, France, brings an unusual outsider-insider perspective to a series of texts published late in the last century. Her readings prompt her to hazard a new conceptual [End Page 86] territory suggested in her title. While I find her distinctions between what she calls a “new” literature of place and earlier features of this genre less absolute than she claims, her study provides a powerful new lens through which to interpret American nature writing in the past generation. Her excellent thesis about the myth of emptiness convincingly reappraises fundamental American mythology concerning the relation of physical space—neighborhoods, landscapes, regions—to identity formation.

The power of this study derives from the ways in which Harding unpacks the diverse cultural assumptions and values attending the notion of an “empty” place and its converse, a filled one. “Under the sign of empty,” great damage has been done over the past three centuries and more. Harding argues that much traditional American nature writing has been complicit in fundamentally flawed assumptions stemming from the delusion that any tract anywhere is empty, devoid of human sign. She employs texts by Rick Bass, Charles Bowden, Ellen Meloy, Jonathan Raban, Rebecca Solnit, and Robert Sullivan to demonstrate a kind of multivalent postmodern suppleness in recent writing about place that artfully transcends the subversive empty/full dichotomy. This suppleness depends upon a complex self-consciousness, and sometimes self-mockery, to suggest a richly nuanced understanding of chosen places as palimpsests revealing layers of diverse human uses. In some respects these writers claim a new quirkiness and a wide range of tone characteristic of personal essayists for many generations.

Harding’s first chapter theoretically deconstructs the myth of emptiness, in the process aligning herself with a nature-culture continuum (not divide) commonplace in environmental history since William Cronon’s celebrated “The Trouble with Wilderness” (1995). Central to her argument is the selected writers’ use of “scripts” in which “they gather events, people, ideas, and places into a textual montage”; they “construct auto-bio-geo-graphies” that resemble “something like hypertexts in which all the versions of a given event and all the possible interpretations could be fitted together” (22, 23). Given their range of scripts, such writers risk tough formal challenges, but in each case the writer braids seemingly contradictory “versions” and “interpretations” into a convincing text.

Harding considers Bass, Bowden, and Meloy together as examples [End Page 87] of intensely personal attachments to their chosen landscapes, in which “place attains a state of quasi personhood . . . troped as wife (Bass), friend (Bowden), and lover (Meloy).” With Raban, Solnit, and Sullivan, the featured landscape “becomes a kind of litmus test revealing the nature of the human and social engagements invested in it” (123). While one could quibble with Harding’s categories and sequence, her readings strongly advance her claim. I’m particularly persuaded by her analysis of Solnit’s Savage Dreams and her calculated return east to Sullivan’s New Jersey Meadowlands in her closing example.

Occasionally the book suffers from exaggeration or redundancy or obscurity (e.g., “polysyndetic coordination”), but these minor elements fade before the compelling argument. The Myth of Emptiness crucially adds to the current critical vocabulary governing contemporary American writing about place. It endorses the long view prerequisite in environmental history.

O. Alan Weltzien
University of Montana Western
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