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chapter eight Postmodern Ecologizing Circumference without a Center Every now and then a reviewer finds he is sorry to have undertaken to review a book that initially looked promising, because he knows that the outcome will probably make everyone unhappy. The reviewer will be unhappy because no matter what position he takes, he will be dissatis fied with the consequences. The author of the book will be unhappy because he is almost certain to feel he has been treated unfairly. And the readers of the review may very well be confounded by an emphasis on the book as a constructed artifact rather than as a vehicle for “contents.” I fear I am about to embark on just such a no-win exercise in trying to provide a fitting account of Lawrence Buell’s The Ecological Imagination : Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture,1 a book with a title more global and ambitious than its contents warrant. It has been given an enthusiastic launching by Harvard University Press and has been much bruited in ecocritical circles. At the very moment I had finished my reading and was despairing about how to handle it, I received in the mail from Harvard University Press a publicity sheet filled with puffs designed to make me feel even more rotten. My minimal consolation is that, apart from my own quirky response, I am sure the book will be well received, highly praised, and provide a generation of graduate students in American Studies (though generations are very brief these days) with plenty of material for dissertations, scholarly articles, and sessions for MLA conventions. A hint of the problems to be faced occurs in the first paragraph of Buell’s introduction: “This book has refused to remain the modest undertaking I intended it to be. Planned as a history of Thoreauvian writing about the American natural environment, it has led me into a broad study of environmental perception, the place of nature in the history of western 85 thought, and the consequences for literary scholarship and indeed for humanistic thought in general of attempting to imagine a more ‘ecocentric’ way of being. I found that I could not discuss green writing without relating it to green thinking and green reading” (1). Having just read the book, I am forced to admit that I don’t recall most of these immense aims being realized in any substantial way, though the subjects are more or less taken up at one point or another. The result, says Buell, “is an exploratory work with several foci rather than one,” and that may be a large part of the problem. Buell attempts to rationalize this by saying, “The combination of broad sweep and cranky hyperfocus [on Thoreau] of which I have forewarned is, I think, in keeping with the nature of environmental representation, which is at least faintly present in most texts but salient in few.” Whether “environmental representation” has a “nature” and whether this is it are open questions, but the book still seems unfocused , and even its key terms, like “environment” and “ecological,” remain somewhat cloudy (quite apart from the fuzzy syntax of the sentence itself ). When I turned the final page, I was left with the sense of a very learned ramble rather than “a broad study.” Had the book’s title and contents adhered to Buell’s original plan, something like “Thoreau and Nature Writing in Nineteenth-Century America,” the reader’s expectations would likely have been more helpfully confined because that is where the major emphasis appears to be. Before I report on a few of the book’s strengths, I would prefer to address other matters first. Buell, a professor of English at Harvard, is probably one of the most learned of the Americanists now dominating the academic scene. His reading and interests, well represented by 137 pages of densely bibliographical notes (roughly one-quarter of the book), are not merely impressive, they are stunning. His acquaintance with world literature , the other arts, philosophy, history, and criticism is matched by the remarkable depth of his knowledge of American literary (and nonliterary) culture. Not only has he read the obscurest of American texts, “ancient” and modern, but his retention of their minute particularity is daunting. His prose is unusually allusive, echoing other writers on every page, and his acquaintance with contemporary culture—from high to pop—is up to the minute. He is so on top of just about everything that, perverse as...

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