The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics by Joshua Schuster

Abstract

The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics, by Joshua Schuster. University of Alabama Press, 2015. 232 pages. Joshua Schuster's The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics may prove to be one of definitive on relationship between American modernist poetics and environment. It not only combines methods of American modernist studies and ecocriticism but also has significant contributions to offer both fields. On one hand, Schuster's analysis of how modernist aesthetics represents early to mid-twentieth-century environments offers a unique approach to periodizing American modernism. By assessing continuities and discontinuities between modernism and modernity, he situates modernism's methods for framing nonhuman environs (both rural and urban) after nineteenth-century romanticism and organicism, but before environmentalist activism of late twentieth century. Industrial waste and polluted environs serve as invigorating sources of aesthetic production for many modernist works--a phenomenon Schuster refers to as (2). The aesthetics of toxic refreshment intentionally departs from romantic and pastoral images of inviolate nature. However, it does so without developing an activist, ethical orientation of care toward environment--which would mean imagining efforts to correct environmental harm, conserve resources, preserve habitats, and hold parties responsible for ecosystem degradation. While modernist artists devote much attention to environmental consequences of modernity, they do not usually undertake a critique of those consequences in order to identify and fix processes and institutions of modernization are responsible. On other hand, by avoiding reading environmental ethics into texts actively resist environmentalist commitments, Schuster seeks to critique and depart from what he sees as overly moralistic reading practices dominate field of ecocriticism. To attend to gap opens up in modernist literature between representation of environs and a sense of care and concern for those environs is to diverge from ecocritical practices have often involved promoting a reading strategy whereby critic parses an archive in search of clear statements of environmental ethics in an artwork (157). The problem Schuster finds with this strategy, and he articulates most clearly in his conclusion, is it leaves out those archives are interested in ecological representation but are ambiguous about advancing any form of environmental ethics. By attending to this ambiguity in modernism, Schuster engages in an effort to open canon of ecocriticism to works of art are dissonant with contemporary reading methods and moral expectations. That is, The Ecology of Modernism uses an ecocritical lens to make case literary critics should not neglect certain pieces of art just because their representational methods do not align well--that is, they are aesthetically dissonant--with a single ethical or political standard. By thus intervening in debates on critical reading practices, Schusters work ends up making a broader contribution to literary studies at large. Schuster particularly frames his argument about critical reading practices as an intervention in debates surrounding what Leo Bersani refers to as the culture of redemption (Bersani 1990). A redemptive method assumes that art can and should perpetuate humanist values of relief from suffering, strive to document and correct social injustices, and bring a sense of meaningfulness to situations appear empty (158). However, Schuster, following Bersani, advocates a method does not decide in advance what capabilities of art might be--arguably aim of reparative and redemptive approaches (see Sedgwick 2003)--but rather attends to way art is able both to relieve social strife and to tarry with experiences of loss, damage, frustration, negativity, and destruction (Schuster 158). …