The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination by Lawrence Buell

Abstract

MLR, 102. I, 2007 I9I the victim, themourner, and the survivor. The range of issues explored in the book inconnection with Electra's anti-Oedipal model of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity range fromhysteria to nostalgia, anarchy, and the feminist politics ofmourning and of renewal. Scott's sophisticated and nuanced readings of Electra provide fascinating insights into the profound impact of psychoanalysis on modernist literature and thought. The juxtaposition of literaryversions of themyth from theGerman and theAnglo American traditions also provides a useful platform for comparison and contrast. The largely historicist and feminist approaches adopted in the book yield powerful readings of the reception of Electra's myth, though at times one is left towonder why, for instance, Strauss's Elektra had such a huge impact outside the immediate historical context offin de siecleVienna, orwhy the interestof the twenty-first century in amodernist Electra should be anything other than historical. Given the rigour of analysis in themain body of thebook, some of theattemptsmade in the introduction to present Electra as a 'blank slate' (p. I I) in opposition toOedipus or as a figure largely ignored by authors before the twentieth century seem unnecessary and rather unconvincing. Although I agree with the claim that the limited theoretical attention theElectra complex has received isprobably fortuitous, leaving as itdoes room for the proliferation of treatments of the heroine in fictional narrative, the reverse does not quite hold true forOedipus. His appropriation by psychoanalysis has not been detrimental tohis reception in literatureand the artsbut enabling.What isdistinctive about the interest in thepost-Freudian Electra isnot somuch a quantitative difference fromher reception in earlier centuries but a qualitative one. Similarly, issues of char acterization, morality, and closure in plays such as Sophocles' Electra (or Seneca's Agamemnon, a noticeable absence from the book) cannot be debated outside the long and complex history of their interpretations. Despite such objections, I have found Scott's book very stimulating and informative.Together with Kathleen L. Komar's Reclaiming Klytemnestra: Revenge or Reconciliation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), which must have appeared too late for theauthor to take intoconsidera tion, it is a valuable addition to thegrowing body of studies on the changing fortunes of theHouse ofAtreus in twentieth-century literature and thought. UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL PANTELIS MICHELAKIS The Future ofEnvironmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagina tion. By LAWRENCE BUELL. (Blackwell Manifestos) Oxford: Blackwell. 2005. X+195 PP. ? I5.99. ISBN 978-1-4051-2476-8. The titleof Lawrence Buell's latest contribution to the field more commonly known as ecocriticism signals both his own and thediscipline's shiftaway from thenarrower focus on thenatural environment suggested by theprefix 'eco', and towards a broader, more hybrid conception of environment that includes the urban, the interweave of built and natural dimensions, and the interpenetration of global and local pressures. Consistent with the project of the series inwhich it appears, The Future ofEn vironmental Criticism functions as an excellent critical introduction to the field of environmental criticism and posits, through a timely reminder that environmental crisis is a broadly cultural issue, the importance of the field for twenty-first-century humanities. The book isdivided into four main sections which discuss theemergence of contemporary environmental criticism (Chapter i), and threeof itsdistinctive con cerns: issues of environmental representation (Chapter 2), its interest in reconception of place as a fundamental of both art and lived experience (Chapter 3), and itsstrong ethical and political commitment (Chapter 4). I92 Reviews Throughout thebook, Buell works hard toestablish the scholarly credentials of his field of enquiry (though on occasion his approach is rather heavy-handed, e.g. the eco-ing of Jameson and Foucault in the section titles 'Ecocentrism and itsDiscon tents' and 'TheWorld, theText and theEcocritic') and to rid itof the spectre of 'what superficially seems an old-fashioned propensity for "realistic" modes of representa tion' (p. 3 i).Here he provides an equable and reasoned reply toDana Phillips's recent attack on his work, but although his illustrative exposition of ecocritical analysis in Chapters 2 and 3 encompasses an exploration of how literarygenres not tradition ally addressed by environmental critics (such as utopian narrative and science fiction) imagine theworld and particularize environmentality, the canon upon which...