Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology ed. by Erin James and Eric Morel (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology ed. by Erin James and Eric Morel Pamela J. Rader Erin James and Eric Morel, eds. Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology. Ohio State UP, 2020. 224p. This essay collection is suited for students and scholars of narrative theory and/or ecocriticism who are looking for methods to blend the two seemingly disparate lenses. Part of The Ohio State University Press’s Theory and Interpretation of Narrative series, it is no surprise to see arguments rooted in the work of its prolific co-editors and eminent narrative studies scholars James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. The inclusion of well-respected ecocritical scholars like Greg Garrard and Ursula Heise bolsters the volume’s heft along with its formulation of questions that drive each chapter. For instance, in Postcolonial Green: Environmental Politics and World Narratives (2010), Heise urges [End Page 118] readers to attend to the “aesthetic transformation of the real” to better understand and even remake the “ecosocial imaginary” (258). In Markku Lehtimäki’s words, “the rhetorical emphasis in narrative studies can also be seen in the service of ecocritical or other politically engaged literary studies” (87). This collection responds to reading narrative as transformative and to envisioning ecocriticism as an evolving but committed praxis. Grounded in questions raised by Monica Fludernik’s and Jan Alber’s works, Hegglund’s chapter opens section one, “Narratology and the Nonhuman,” with the natural and the unnatural not as binary opposites but as a method for reframing questions around mimesis, emergent agency, and “the contingency of the ‘human’ as a narratological category” (43). In his study of VanderMeer’s Annihilation, Hegglund argues that boundaries are blurred between real world and impossible storyworld, which he coins as “weird storyworld” for a narrative that refutes the subject/object divide for a hybrid emergent ontology. While methodically outlining how object-oriented plots decenter human realities, Caracciolo’s case study stretches narratology practice to concern itself with the intertwining of human experiences and nonhuman phenomena in Underworld and Babel. In the second section, “Econarratological Rhetoric and Ethics,” authors Morel, Lehtimäki, and Garrard draw heavily on Phelan’s narratology influence. Morel’s chapter opens with a practical interrogation of how Rabinowitz’s rules can be useful to gauge readers’ reactions to climate change and how climate change might influence reading. Revisiting Twain’s paratext of The American Claimant and responding to reader-writer reactions in contemporary print culture such as The New Yorker and The New York Times, Morel makes a clear case for infusing econarratology with rhetorical narrative theory lexicon and practices as climate change is continually interpreted by readers who bring their contextual framework to older and newer texts. Lehtimäki reads McEwan’s Solar as a “metarhetorical narrative about climate change,” claiming that literary fictions abet insights into the rhetoric around climate change. Garrard’s analysis of Richard Powers’s novel Gain offers a model for bringing Phelan’s “ethics of telling” to the forefront of ecocritical studies; focusing on the story’s formal components, Garrard illustrates the dilemma of responding ethically to texts that do not narratively offer a pat moralism. [End Page 119] In the third and final section, “Anthropocene Storyworlds,” the authors draw upon the cognitive narratology scholarship of David Herman, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Erin James. Von Mossner builds on cognitive narratology and examines the role of embodied simulation and character empathy to understand the reciprocal relationships between characters and narrative environs. She argues that readers sense and feel along with Babb’s prairie protagonists because literary works “evoke virtual environments in emotionally salient ways” (144). Next, Low recognizes that narrative has played a significant role in perpetuating the notion of the prairie as barren; interested in restoration ecology, he pairs fieldwork with narrative theory for the reconstruction of the prairie ecosystem and prairie storyworld. Distinguishing it from Trexler’s Anthropocene fiction, Bracke defines climate fiction (or cli-fi) as novels that paint climate change and crisis; the genre underscores the familiarity of the textual world to the real world that results in defamiliarization. With a stress on the telling and its form, she argues that how we tell the...