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Taking up the green thread from ebr4, Harold Fromm reviews three new books of eco-criticism >— ebr4 critical ecologies

Books dealing with ecology and environment are now a vast industry, an avalanche of information and opinion that exceeds anybody’s ken. The “environment” itself keeps growing, enlarging, encompassing, so that the environment of 1998 is a very different thing from what it was on the first Earth Day in 1970. The sheer number of disciplines that has evolved since Aldo Leopold’s landmark Sand County Alamanc of 1949 is startling - environmental medicine, environmental history, environmental engineering, environmental ethics, social ecology, green travel, green farming, conservation biology, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, animal rights, to name a few - exceeding in subtlety and complexity such early concerns as emissions, toxic waste, acid rain, cancer clusters, etc. On the World Wide Web alone the information is daunting, hopeless, beyond belief.

Joseph McElroy shares field notes and reflections from Mount St. Helens.

Nearly two decades after the great eruption of May, 1980, a slow, remarkable regrowth of flora as well as a massive human involvement feed back to me old questions about the ecological order and our place in it. “A mountain bounces back,” I read; Mt. St. Helens has struggled “to be born again.” That’s not it, I think, but I am moved by the reappearance of plants and trees and animals and fish at Mt. St. Helens - the symbiotic reaching out of fungus filaments to plants roots deep beneath the volcanic ash, the herd of Roosevelt’s elk returning to feed on grass sprouting from the earth of an apparently unwelcoming ashy, silica-infused but now media-hyped “miraculous mudslide.” This blast equal to 2500 Hiroshimas the environment did, not us. But what is the environment? I search the abstracts of some of the more than 500 vineyard-laboring, exact, and specialized field studies that have provided “an excellent baseline for tracking ecosystem reassembly here.” I puzzle the human significance, if any, and will make a few field notes of my own to locate among these phenomenal events the voice and place of my species too. I take for granted here that the human organism finds itself in an ecology humanly social and political with all that that, from Plato to Bateson and Schumacher and the Bureau of Land Management, tries to comprehend; but I wander here in a specifically volcanic wilderness and in the presence of the psyche.

Toward a definition of a postmodern genre: the field-novel.

“And the field was him,” a sentence in Plus, a novel by Joseph McElroy, warrants an inquiry into field and the novel. The novelty of McElroy’s fiction grows from the attempt to use the structure of a novel as itself a field, presenting actions which occur within fields. He displays field as aesthetic structure, and field as content of aesthetic structure. So within the novel, events which occur within a field can also be seen as themselves constituting a field. In both field as structure and as content, the hero is intelligible as a region of a field, not as a sphere or core of individuality which passes through a field in fulfillment of a destiny.

To introduce an electronicbookreview, in the very medium that is reducing book technology to amuseum piece, is to confront some of the more persistent culturalcontradictions of the past few decades. This is the late age of printwe’re in, when all the books worth saving are being scanned into digitalarchives, and the very conception of the book as a fixed object isgiving way to the hyperreality of letters floating on a screen. Forthose writers who are committed to working in the new electronicenvironments, such a “review” might better be named a “retrospective,” amere scholarly commemoration of a phenomenon that is passing. “The deathof books” has spawned a rather lively academic discourse of its own,following in the wake of post-history, post-structuralism,post-feminism, and the various postmodernisms that have worked toundercut the authority of original authorship. The argument has beenmade that technological change represents a happy “convergence” withdevelopments in literary theory; yet new technologies and media ofreproduction are pervasive enough to have themselves produced thecultural climate that gave rise to the theory. As the critic and mediatheorist William Paulson has argued, there’s a technological subtext tothe declining prestige of authors and literary canons. To bring thatsubtext to the surface will be part of ebr’s agenda.

Davis Schneiderman revisits the non-debate between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, touches on recent flare-ups in the American Book Review and the NOW WHAT blog, and reflects on the economy of book jacket blurbs.

Kiki Benzon on narrative ecology and the “fradulence paradox” of Oblivion.

Lisette Gonzales reviews a book of essays by Matthew Fuller that examines the way we are programmed by software.

Have you seen a cyborg today? Would you know it if you had? A creature of science fiction novels, electronic engineering, and postmodern theory, the cyborg is like the white heron of Sarah Orne Jewett’s story: often discussed but seldom glimpsed. The ambiguity of what one means by a cyborg rumbles through Diane Greco’s electronic hypertext Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric as she plays a series of electronic riffs on Donna Haraway’s now famous essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” giving it, to my Los Angeles ear, an unsettling quality not unlike the queasiness I feel when I go through the mountain tunnel of the Universal Studios tour.

(Source: ebr)