Bruce Clarke’s review of Joseph Carroll’s Literary Darwinism similarly challenges the Neo Darwinists’ supposed scientific objectivity. Their project can only fail to see beyond the category of the human precisely because the circularity of their argument presupposes that which it seeks to analyze: “the only scientific observers of ‘human nature’ available are themselves human beings.”

Laura Dassow Walls’ call for ‘deliberative’ reading practices echo her earlier critique of E.O. Wilson’s notion of ‘consilience’. Here Walls argues, Wilson’s attempt to forge an alliance between the sciences and the humanities fails because “Wilson writes as a scientist, imbuing every page with the sublime authority that allows him to mangle history without penalty and dismiss his opponents without argument.”

Ursula K. Heise makes a consonant argument in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford UP, 2008), which looks at (among other dimensions of the evolution of ecocritical thought itself) the dynamic tension through which the globalist-environmentalist thought of the 1960s-70s propelled itself forward in tension with the U.S American line of antimodernist environmentalist and ecocritical localism.

Still, all this might require imagining a methodology which, beyond marking positive connective relations between positive (visible) figures (Thoreau and Commandante Marcos), however far flung from each other, sees in “deep time” (the cue taken from Dimock’s work, below) the figure of erasure that any insurgent self-critical project of Euro-Atlantic modernity itself—such as a renovated ecocritical or any other criticism—must also face. We mustn’t forget, perhaps, that there is no properly “global scale” for comparison: “the globe” is a circumscriptive figure, in equal or greater measure as… continue

There is perhaps nothing in either R/romanticism or neo-Romanticism that requires identification with critical naivete and ignorance, here, or with necessarily less theoretically sophisticated approaches than the alternatives to be proposed in what follows. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that R/romanticism is in fact the best name for that “masocritical” insurgency, undertaken from within the Erinnerung of Euro-Atlantic modernity, which, in its preservation of a figure of strong and even incommensurable “local” difference, stands the best chance of contacting the opposition traced by… continue