German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene ed. by Heather I. Sullivan and Caroline Schaumann

Abstract

Reviewed by: German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene ed. by Heather I. Sullivan and Caroline Schaumann Timothy Attanucci Heather I. Sullivan and Caroline Schaumann, eds. German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 348 pp. The title of this volume of collected essays is as programmatic as it is succinct. The adjective "German" marks the disciplinary purview of the essays, which emerged from several conference panels organized by the Trans-Atlantic Network in the Environmental Humanities at the University of Washington and the Environmental Studies Network of the German Studies Association. More than a territorial demarcation, however, this disciplinary choice reflects the editors' desire to correct the historical belatedness of German Studies (or Germanistik) in embracing ecocriticism. As one can read in the preface by Americanist Ursula K. Heise and in the editors' introduction, "ecocriticism" first appeared in Anglo-Saxon contexts, and the reasons for Germany's hesitation are varied. Among other things, Heise suggests that the German tradition lacks the genre of "nature writing," but also that its ecological traditions are both burdened with the loaded history of concepts like Heimat and benefit from significant media resonance and political outlets (i.e., the Green Party), whose failure in the American context may explain a complementary boom in US-academic activism. [End Page 336] As the editors point out, however, "the concept of 'nature' has a long-standing and important tradition in German literature, though only few scholars have critically investigated the approaches, definitions, and ramifications of 'nature' in German texts in a theoretical and sustained manner" (11). If this is the case, then, as the editors readily admit, the situation is rapidly changing. In the German context, for example, two introductions to ecocriticism (Bühler, 2016; Dürbeck and Stobbe, 2015) now compete with several other collected volumes (Goodbody and Rigby, 2011; Wilke and Frost, 2013; Duerbeck et al., 2017; Novero, Obermayer, and Barton, 2017). Indeed, another volume published in 2017, Readings in the Anthropocene, edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone, also takes up the term "Anthropocene," which has become increasingly popular as a designation for our current state of environmental crisis. The preface and the introduction of this volume make a compelling case that the "Anthropocene"—an as yet unofficial epoch of geological time first popularized by Paul Crutzen, and now approved by a special working group of the International Union of Geologic Sciences—presents a significant challenge to environmental thinking and "ecocriticism" alike. In short, accepting that human activity has left a permanent geological record undermines the distinction between a human "inside" and an environmental "outside." We can thus no longer simply "critique" the human relationship to nature, imagined as an ecology without humans, nor the destruction of the environment, imaged as a space surrounding humanity. Or as Heise argues in her frequently cited monograph (Sense of Place; 2010), the Anthropocene forces a transition from a "sense of place" to a "sense of planet." In her preface here, Heise proposes that this "sense of planet" implies a provocation for cultural studies, which until now have relied on a notion of culture delineated by language, tradition, or nation. Without closing itself off to the global impact of the Anthropocene, the essays collected here meet the challenge of demonstrating the value of recognizing cultural specificity—in this instance, German, Swiss, and Austrian specificities, which are often engaged in complex forms of communication with other cultures. The first part of this book takes up the notion of "place" as an organizing principle. In her essay, "The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene," Heather I. Sullivan argues that the literary category of the pastoral not only still has relevance for ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, but also can serve as a litmus test for the literary history of this new epoch. In tracing the "dark" side, or the "darkening" of the pastoral from Goethe to Storm and Trojanow, Sullivan shows how the growing consciousness of ecological change impacts the German cultural imagination of the idyllic "restriction" (Jean Paul) of ecological places. Simon Richter likewise situates Goethe as the starting point of an Anthropocene, but his "ecoliguistic" approach introduces an innovative marker of cultural change: in the semantic differentiation of...