Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts (review)Claire Bracken

Utopian Studies, Volume 22, Number 1, 2011, pp. 171-174 (Article)

Published by Penn State University PressDOI: 10.1353/utp.2011.0001

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Book Reviews

171

Christine Cusick, ed. Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts .

Cork: Cork University Press, 2010. 269 pp. Cloth, 39.00, isbn: 978-1-85918-454-7.

Reviewed by Claire Bracken, Union College

Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts is a signifi cant collection of essays in a mode of critical inquiry that is becoming an increasing fi eld of importance in literary and cultural studies. But perhaps mode is not the best way to describe the practices of ecocriticism. Following Lawrence Buell, we can consider it to be issue-driven rather than functioning as a specifi c meth-odology, imagining it as a space that gathers itself around a commitment to environmentality (2004, 11). In this way, academic ecocritical works can be interpreted as having a shared material bedrock, all the while navigating diff er-ent routes and pathways in their travels over, across, and within the spaces of the earth. The essays in Out of the Earth display such exciting variability, deploy-ing as they do diff erent locations (theoretical, generic, aesthetic, temporal) from which to consider the intersections between Irish landscape and text, between people and place. Given the overdetermination of the cultural and political sig-nifi cance of land in the Irish historical imaginary due to the specifi cs of imperi-alism, decolonization, and, most recently, capitalist development, the innovative textual readings of this collection are a real and noteworthy achievement.

In the main, the texts considered in Out of the Earth are literary, encom-passing poetry, drama, fi ction, and memoir, with the one exception being Ein Flannerys piece on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century touristic writing and poster pictures. The collection is bookended with an introduction by the renowned ecocritic John Elder and a concluding interview by the

Utopian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2011 Copyright 2011. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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editor, Christine Cusick, with cartographer and writer Tim Robinson. The interview is fascinating for the account it gives of the self (in this case the mapping and writing self ) in connection with place, as Robinson discusses his method of getting to know the landscapes he charts, which incorporates the textual and the material, but in such a way that disrupts the binary of nature/culture, as the material is shown to be infused with the textual and vice versa, since the world is total interconnectivity (207).

Indeed, all the essays in the book address the nature/culture divide, with some interrogating the historical privileging of culture in literary criticism and others, such as Flannerys, challenging the division altogether in favor of a strategy of dwelling in the world, a form of locatedness that allows for an ecocriticism of material and historical specifi city. His postcolonial critique and assessment of imperialist touristic texts of Ireland, which were domina-ted by images of the rural picturesque and the ruin, reveal the way in which ecocritical discourse can be placed in dialogue with other forms of critical and theoretical registers. This is also evident in Jeff erson Holdridges essay on Lady Morgans The Wild Irish Girl and William Carletons The Black Prophet , which interweaves a discussion on the aestheticthe sublime and beauti-ful Irish landscapewith a politicized colonial context of union that allows for the unsettling power of the nonhuman to be articulated and brought forth. Donna Pottss article on Michael Longleys environmental elegies similarly laces the political with the natural, demonstrating the dual and con-nective functioning of the poetry as speaking to both Northern Ireland and environmental issues at once. Neither is privileged; rather, both are valued in their interconnectedness.

The romanticization of the Irish landscape, in both imperialist and nationalist discourses, is addressed by many of the essays in the collection, something of crucial importance in an ecocritical context given the appropri-ating gesture involved. Cultural representations of the Aran Islands have been saturated in this way, as explored by Karen OBrien in her analysis of Martin McDonaghs contemporary play The Cripple of Inismaan , where she focuses on the emblem of rock fi ssure as a symbol of the constructedness (and hence artifi ciality) of representations. Thus, the deployment of landscape as symbol is reappropriated and turned in on itself. Joy Kennedy-ONeills article is also concerned with the space of the islands, specifi cally looking at Synges play Riders to the Sea and the powerful force of the ocean, performing a revaluation of critical work on Synge that has focused on language and culture.

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The potential of ecocritical discourse to open up and revaluate canonical interpretations engages Joanna Tap Pierces comprehensive essay on Elizabeth Bowen, which questions readings of place in Bowens work that determine it in terms of symbolic representation. Pierces tracing of the relationship between place and self in Bowens Court , Seven Winters , and The Last September demonstrates the importance of setting as a living entity, thus deconstructing an anthropomorphic critical lens, a move also performed by Greg Winston in his essay on George Moores The Untilled Field . In his analysis of the stories, Winston stays close to the material realities of harsh agrarian landscapes in post-Famine Ireland, considering the interconnected realities of emigration, landscape and Irish identity (84).

While many of the essays focus on the rural, vistas of the urban are also present, refl ective of more general trends in ecocriticism that aim to open up the meaning of what constitutes the natural environment. This is evident in Miriam OKane Maras piece on Roddy Doyle, which considers pollution and place in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha , establishing the novel as a critique on capitalist development in postmodern Irish culture. Similarly, Kathryn Kirkpatrick considers the urban poetics of contemporary poet Paula Meehan, analyzing her work from an ecofeminist perspective, con-sidering the cultural connections between woman and landscape as having the potential to disrupt the patriarchal machineries of neoliberal capitalism. Maureen OConnor takes up a comparable position in her essay on Edna OBrien. She examines the fi gural connections between animal and woman in OBriens work as marking the abjection of the feminine in patriarchal cultures, an abjection that has the power to unsettle and disturb. Kirkpatricks and OConnors critical frames are unusual in the context of Irish feminist crit-icism more generally, which has tended to focus more on separating woman from nature and the Mother Ireland construction. Interestingly, then, their ecocritical analysis opens up space for new ways of thinking about embodied feminine subjectivity in contemporary cultural analysis.

As a whole, Out of the Earth engenders a reconsideration of construc-tions of Irish subjectivity. Eamonn Walls essay on poet Richard Murphy (the fi rst essay in the book) provides a theoretical overview of ecocritical theory and demonstrates how this form of reading allows us to establish connec-tions to the materiality of land. This eff ect is something shared by all the essays in the collection, thus having the important consequence of negoti-ating the structure of self hood (a separated, divided Oedipal subject) as it

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has been traditionally constructed in the Irish imaginary. It establishes new and diff erent paradigms for the fi eld of Irish studies, establishing a dialogue between it and an interdisciplinary subject of current and future infl uential signifi cance. This excellent collection will be not just of use to scholars of ecocriticism and Irish literature alike but also an invaluable student guide for current and future courses on the subject.

Work Cited

Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination . Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, eds. New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction .

Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. xii + 362 pp. Cloth, $44.95, isbn: 9781570037368.

Reviewed by Edward K. Chan, Kennesaw State University

This volume continues the exploration of politics and science fi ction that began in Hassler and Wilcoxs previous collection, Political Science Fiction (1997), which itself began as a special issue of Extrapolation in 1993. Some of the same issues have carried over into New Boundaries , including essays devoted to the Star Trek megatext, cyberpunk, feminist science fi ction, Latin American science fi ction, and of course utopia and dystopia. Although humanities scholars predominate in the newer book, there are signifi cant contributions from those in the social sciencespolitical science, government, lawas well as one neuroscientist. In the preface to the previous collection, Hassler and Wilcox had noted the historic anniversaries that attended the preparation of that volume in 1995: fi fty years after Victory-in-Europe Day, twenty-fi ve years

Utopian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2011 Copyright 2011. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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