Person: Buell, Lawrence
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Buell, Lawrence
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Publication Anthropocene Panic: Contemporary Ecocriticism and the Issue of Human Numbers(2016) Buell, LawrenceEnvironmental humanists rightly believe they have valuable contributions to make to rethinking and redressing Anthropocene Age excess. Ecocriticism’s recent maturation as an interdiscipline has put it in a stronger position to do so than ever before. Its “material” turn in the 2000s bears this out up to a point, but its interventions also seem somewhat self-limiting. This essay argues that ecocritics and environmental humanists more generally have foregone a promising opportunity by avoiding the controversial issue of unsustainable human population growth as a sociohistorical phenomenon and an impetus to creative imagination.Publication Environmental Writing for Children: A Selected Reconnaissance of Heritages, Emphases, Horizons(Oxford University Press, 2014) Buell, Lawrence; Garrard, GregThis article analyzes representative topoi or traditions emanating from the so-called golden age of children’s writing in the late Victorian era that feature encounters with the physical environment. It traces the emergence of modern (Western) environmentally oriented children’s literature and examines the permutations of two overlapping topoi that have served as carriers of environmental concern since the late nineteenth century. It reviews works that purport to imagine nonhuman life-worlds from the standpoint of the creatures themselves and those that deal with the discovery or construction of special, often hidden outdoor places by children that are shown to have catalytic significance in bonding them to the natural environment.Publication Antipodal Propinquities? Environmental (Mis)Perceptions in American and Australian Literary History(Sydney University Press, 2010) Buell, LawrencePublication The unkillable dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as test case(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2008) Buell, LawrencePublication Literature and environment(Annual Reviews, 2011) Buell, Lawrence; Heise, Ursula K.; Thornber, KarenSince prehistory, literature and the arts have been drawn to portrayals of physical environments and human-environment interactions. The modern environmentalist movement as it emerged first in the late-nineteenth century and, in its more recent incarnation, in the 1960s, gave rise to a rich array of fictional and nonfictional writings concerned with humans' changing relationship to the natural world. Only since the early 1990s, however, has the long-standing interest of literature studies in these matters generated the initiative most commonly known as “ecocriticism,” an eclectic and loosely coordinated movement whose contributions thus far have been most visible within its home discipline of literature but whose interests and alliances extend across various art forms and media. In such areas as the study of narrative and image, ecocriticism converges with its sister disciplines in the humanities: environmental anthropology, environmental history, and environmental philosophy. In the first two sections, we begin with a brief overview of the nature, significance, and evolution of literature-environment studies. We then summarize in more detail six specific centers of interest: (a) the imagination of place and place-attachment, (b) the enlistment and critique of models of scientific inquiry in the study of literature and the arts, (c) the examination of the significance of gender difference and environmental representation, (d) the cross-pollination of ecocritical and postcolonial scholarship as ecocriticism has extended its horizons beyond its original focus on Anglo-American imagination, (e) ecocriticism's evolving interest in indigenous art and thought, and (f) ecocri-ticism's no less keen and complex attentiveness to artistic representation and the ethics of relations between humans and animals.Publication New Directions in (Transnational) American Literature Studies(School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing University, 2009) Buell, LawrenceNever has there been a better moment for foreign scholars outside the English-speaking world to engage in American literature studies. American literature studies is increasingly studied worldwide and the contributions of foreign-born and foreign-based Americanists are becoming increasingly influential. This lecture will attempt to explain this turn of events, with special emphasis on analysis of selected newer transnational and comparative approaches to American literature studies. Background factors contributing to the emergence of these new approaches will be surveyed briefly. These include the changing demography of American academia, the challenges to the traditional canon from within American literary studies of the 1970s and after, and the rise of new historicism, postcolonialism, and critical race studies. The lecture will concentrate especially, however, on defining the types of approach employed by the newer transnational Americanist scholarship. These will be illustrated by describing a number of recent books and articles that suggest the promise of these approaches. Five broad, overlapping initiatives will be defined: (1) author-focused studies that broaden the critical horizon of understanding beyond the scope of the national; (2) projects focusing on linguistic translation or cross-cultural communication; (3) studies of circulation of texts and cross-cultural influences within international zones (the Atlantic world, the transpacific world, the Americas); (4) projects that address cultural mobility on a global scale; and (5) ecocritical studies of transnational environmental interdependencies or affinities. Most, as we shall see, are quite heterogeneous. Within most we find considerable methodological diversity and debate.Publication What is Called Ecoterrorism(University of Thessalonikēs, 2009) Buell, LawrenceThe perceived threat of ecological terrorism has become a major concern of environmental discourse during the past two decades and ominously shifted focus in the process. This neologism has been brandished as an epithet both from the “right,” in the first instance to stigmatize eco- and animal rights activism, and from the “left,” to stigmatize state and corporate-sponsored violence. The activists quickly lost this war of words, however, so that “ecoterrorism” discourse has become predominantly a rhetorical weapon not only against radicals but sometimes even mainstream reformist initiatives. Through the lens of literary history, the shift is encapsulated by the genesis and reception of two novels: Edward Abbey’s cult classic The Monkey-Wrench Gang (1975), a catalytic inspiration for the Earth First! Movement but later a poster-child for right-wing critics of “ecoterrorism”; and Michael Crichton’s eco-thriller State of Fear (2004), in which an eco-radical organization figures as a satanic adversary secretly deployed by a supposedly respectable mainstream environ-mental group. It might seem that 9/11 would have played a crucial role in putting what one political theorist has called “resistance citizenship” on the defensive. But that is less true than one might suppose from the claims usually made for 9/11’s world-historical import. In this case, the “zero hypothesis” rejected by Jean Baudrillard (9/11 made no appreciable difference in the world power structure) seems broadly true. The deeper cultural logic of this irony is then explored, with reference to the long tradition of conspiracy phobia in U.S. history, as well as the political thought of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, and others. I then return to the question of how radical ecotheory’s ethical paradigms might abet overreaction rejected by Baudrillard and conclude with some reflections on the possible future(s) of eco-resistance citizenship.Publication Emerson, Thoreau, and Transcendentalism(Duke University Press, 1975) Buell, LawrencePublication Circling the Spheres: A Dialogue(Duke University Press, 1998) Buell, LawrencePresents a dialogue focusing on the notion of separate spheres in American literary history. Identification of women writers in the antebellum period; Examination of literary ethnography traditions; View on the development of African American studies.Publication Melville and the question of American decolonization(Duke University Press, 1992) Buell, LawrenceDiscusses Herman Melville's book Billy Budd concerning its sources and how it unfolds in Melville's life and work. Signs of cultural deference in the biographical record; The publication history of Typee; The Treaty of Versailles certainly did not free this American Israel; Melville's astringency toward republican economic and political institutions in the work of the 1850s; Melville's use of literal and symbolic contrasts; More.