Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept by Timothy Clark (review)

Timothy Clark's Ecocriticism on the Edge has not yet received the attention it deserves in the environmental humanities. This could be because it looks, on the surface, like an introduction or a review of the field, like Clark's highly teachable Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. The title might suggest a survey of ecocriticism rather than a new intervention, and the cover is generic compared with that of a book like Ursula Heise's Imagining Extinction.⁹ Meanwhile, many environmental humanities scholars do not consider themselves ecocritics or engage that particular scholarly tradition as it emerged from Anglo-American literary studies during the 1990s. But while it includes large portions of review, Clark's book contains original arguments built from a long-term, theoretically savvy engagement with ecocriticism as a field. For me, it has as much to add to the Anthropocene discourse as Haraway's Staying with the Trouble,¹⁰ which is not to diminish Haraway's book but to praise Clark's. Its contributions are about scale, literary theory, and ecopolitics. The three topics overlap in the mode of a Venn diagram. I summarize what Clark says about each one, note one of the book's limitations, then outline a question it poses to future work.

The overall argument flows from Ecocriticism's perspective on scale, especially from Clark's correlated interest in two concepts: "scale effects" and "scale framing." With these concepts, he points out that the Anthropocene creates problems of scale through vertiginous interconnected pathways that sweep from molecules to planetary petro-infrastructures. Scale effects are the qualitative effects that emerge from quantitative accumulation, so that scale is not a linear or zoom-like shift from big to small. In Clark's words, scale effects are "phenomena that are invisible at normal levels of perception but only emerge if one changes the spatial and temporal scale at which issues are framed" (p. 22). As Mark McGurl, Anna Tsing, Wai Chee Dimock, and others have noted, the alternative, less mathematical, more material concept of scale is one in which there are discontinuities across which things happen differently.¹¹ It follows that "the human" cannot possibly mean the same thing at the small scale of, say, Levinasian ethics and the large scale of the anthropos of the Anthropocene, where "our species" becomes a geobiological force. The Anthropocene is a "threshold concept" because it brings these questions into relief.

Scale framing is about making a cut and establishing the spatial and temporal boundaries at which we consider a phenomenon. The concept already exists in specialist ecology, where it refers to how such boundaries, when ecologists choose them, affect the patterns they see. In taking up the concept, Clark also revises it. For him, "an unavoidable element of any representation, evaluation or literary reading is to presuppose or project a certain scale in space and time for its issues." Thus, "scale forms a … decisive but almost universally overlooked structural feature of any sort of reading" (p. 73). Building on David Wood's eco-phenomenology, Derrida's work, and readings of the image of the Earth from space, Clark convincingly accounts for how scales of observation affect what we see.¹² The argument is not that scale framing is the only thing that makes spatial and temporal domains (the climate, a city, a geological epoch) real, but that representation inevitably involves a more or less adequate relation between the domain in which scale effects arise and the chosen frame of reference. The one-day scale frame of Joyce's Ulysses is not much use for observing the material difference between the Holocene and the Anthropocene, but opening the frame to 500 million years would make the same difference unobservable.

Correlating scale effects with scale framing suggests a new approach to literary interpretation. In a reading of Raymond Carver's story "The Elephant," Clark outlines this approach by showing how varying the scale frame changes the meaning...