The Ecological Voice in Recent German-Swiss Prose by Andrew Liston (review)

Andrew Liston’s study belongs in a growing body of scholarship that concerns itself with the question of literature and ecology within German Studies. The context for his intervention is the large quantity of artistic responses to perceived ecological threats in our contemporary society. Liston makes ecocriticism the methodological framework for his interpretations of contemporary Swiss prose texts that probe the links between culture and the environment. Ecocritical approaches to literature emphasize its role in bringing about a change in the perception of nature from Western attitudes that foreground the increasing alienation from nature through modernization and urbanization to an understanding of the self as also defined by the surrounding environment.

In order to promote a rethinking of our place within the environment from a philosophical perspective, Liston consults the work of Martin Heidegger, in particular his idea of poetical dwelling as a way to express a subjective and personal connection to a place that is critical of and avoids the dominant mode of perception in the Western tradition, i.e., the construction of the subject as onlooker. For Liston, the expression of such a profound connection between culture and nature is a key element in the German tradition: “Goethe was one of the earliest to draw attention to the damage man does to his environment and the attendant dangers of a lack of respect for ecology” (18). Within that tradition, the environment is a particularly prominent element of the Swiss collective unconscious and it comes as no surprise to Liston that contemporary Swiss writers exhibit a thematic bias toward the relationship between man and nature: “With the natural environment so deeply ingrained into the general consciousness it is reasonable to expect that within Swiss literature the ecological texts themselves will often demonstrate a sophisticated narrative approach to mankind’s relationship to nature” (22).

Liston turns to classical positions within ecocriticism such as Lawrence Buell’s concept of the environmental imagination and Cheryll Glotfelty’s definition of the relationship between literature and the environment, but he also consults Jost Hermand’s early work on the green German tradition and Axel Goodbody’s important critical work on the culture of German environmentalism to advance the idea of what he calls the ecological voice. The ecological voice in literature refers to works that deal with mankind’s relationship to nature on a thematic level but also seek an aesthetic expression for the natural world in specific narrative strategies. This connection between advancing an ecological thematic and refining a poetic practice in the concept of the ecological voice is Liston’s contribution to an ecocriticism that slowly but surely opens up to European perspectives. His study has to be seen within the context of finding common ground between ecocritical readings of literature and other methodological engagements with literature and culture, in this case the subfield of narratology.

Liston turns to Genette and Bakhtin in order to advance a position that combines the acknowledgment of a mimetic dimension in literature and refined strategies of contemporary poetic practice. Here Ursula Heise’s work on Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: the Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008) would have been tremendously helpful in applying ecocritical perspectives to modern and postmodern strategies of cultural embodiment and combining environmental and ecological readings with refined aesthetic analyses. Lawrence Buell’s more recent work on the future of the environmental imagination (such as his 2005 volume The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination) and generally more up-to-date work on the latest developments within ecocriticism and what is constituting itself now as interdisciplinary approaches within the environmental humanities would have been helpful to contextualize Liston’s study within a broader framework and establish a dialogue between what these Swiss writers are doing and what is going on elsewhere. But as a contribution to the field of German-Swiss studies, this book is a marvelous beginning in suggesting connections between the ecological voice that emerges from these...