Ebook: Ecocriticism (The New Critical Idiom)

This is cultural criticism, but it isn't really ecocriticism, nor is it an accurate representation of the field.

Most of this book is an engagement with environmental politics, which Garrard handles well enough. One reviewer is correct in that the book "punctures certain ecopieties," but sadly it doesn't represent ecocriticism's soundness beyond those pieties. Therefore, we get a reviewer praising it for simply affirming his distates for some brand of environmental politics, rather than for better articulating the field of literary criticism through an ecological lens. "Ecological" means "through the application of ecology." Garrard often misses this, indeed missing the very core of the discipline while purporting to represent it.

The New Critical Idiom books are often oddball constructs. They tend to be written by theorizers and cultural critics whose issue orientation causes them to skip over the basic tenets of a discipline and riff on the fringes. For instance, Garrard wastes a considerable amount of the "Animals" chapter on a Philip K. Dick novel and the nonsense of Andrew Ross and Donna Haraway regarding "cyborgs," along with other pop culture choices, rather than focusing on strong literature incorporating animals and critics that seriously analyzed it--which would have actually represented ecocriticism.

If you want to read ecocriticism, then I recommend reading Glen Love, Thomas J. Lyon, Don Scheese, and Cheryll Glotfelty, among a few others. Or just read the essays of the best nature writers, who are often better readers than so-called theorists are, and who have put their boots on the ground.

Mainly, what you want to look for is ecocriticism that actually *analyzes literature*. That's ostensibly why ecocriticism is populated by English professors. Sadly, English professors have lost their way, collectively speaking. And ecocriticism is hard to really describe if you're using only an urban campus map.