{"title":"Agrotopias:美国可持续发展文学史》,作者艾比-L-古德(评论)","authors":"Ian Finseth","doi":"10.1353/eal.2024.a918917","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\n<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability</em> by Abby L. Goode <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ian Finseth (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability</em><br/> <small>abby l. goode</small><br/> University of North Carolina Press, 2022<br/> 276 pp. <p>The animating impulse of this important, well-executed study is a desire to challenge both \"the supposed benevolence of American environmental writing\" (2) and a scholarly \"tendency to engage with the nation's eugenic and agrarian histories separately\" (5). The ideals of self-reliant agricultural life and of a sustainable approach to natural resources, as twinned and potent forms of cultural discourse, turn out, in Goode's account, to be poisoned at the root. From Thomas Jefferson's encomiums to the \"cultivators of the earth\" all the way to the twenty-first century, they have been poisoned by fear—fear of overpopulation, of miscegenation, of the racial other, of moral pollution, of rampant fertility, of \"real Americans\" getting squeezed out of their rightful place. There was never some golden age of agrarian sustainability, nor even a belief in such a golden age, but rather images of disorder, degeneration, and corruption that motivated different ways of conceiving of—or fantasizing about—orderly, harmonious, and productive places and futures. These \"agrotopias,\" Goode writes, \"exist elsewhere, beyond the threat of demographic or agricultural decline,\" and they \"constitute attempts to revise and reclaim a long-lost agrarian ideal of 'New World' abundance\" (3).</p> <p>The central theoretical premise of <em>Agrotopias</em> is that sustainability rhetoric and the agrarian myth \"cannot be disentangled\" (16) from the United States' long, violent history of racism, nativism, reproductive control, and eugenics. What results is a highly effective analysis of the ways in which <strong>[End Page 174]</strong> images of the good life—a healthy relationship of the human to the environmental—are shadowed by and vitiated by a desire for racial homogeneity. Along the way, famously progressive figures, including Walt Whitman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are subject to sharp, occasionally devastating, critique. Even Michelle Obama's White House garden, in the epilogue, is implicated in the problematic legacy of Jeffersonian agrarianism. Although the book can feel repetitive in places, that repetitiveness actually comes to seem formally appropriate to the endless reinscriptions of the ideological problem Goode investigates. After reading the book, one might well ask whether there is <em>any</em> kind of environmental discourse that is not fatally compromised by the racial and reproductive legacies of the past.</p> <p>One might also ask, however, <em>why</em> we cannot disentangle these ideological strands from one another. The metaphor of \"entanglement\" is a compelling one, as it appeals to our scholarly sense that everything is complicated and nothing simple. But it is also, at the end of the day, metaphorical. Is modern American environmental discourse really so corrupted by its own dark history that it's impossible to employ the language of sustainability without invoking or reinforcing that history? Can we preserve what is virtuous about early environmental writing (whether penned by Jefferson or anyone else) without accepting what is undesirable about it? Answering such questions properly goes beyond the scope of a book review, but they are questions that readers of <em>Agrotopias</em> should ponder. And how one answers them will depend, to a significant degree, on the particular texts that one brings under the microscope.</p> <p>In that respect, Goode has chosen a fascinating combination of literary works to consider, ranging chronologically from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's <em>Letters from an American Farmer</em> (1782) through Charlotte Perkins Gilman's <em>Herland</em> (1915). Also featured are a number of unexpected entrants, including Leonora Sansay's <em>Secret History</em> (1802); Her-man Melville's <em>Pierre</em> (1852); Sutton Griggs's <em>Imperium in Imperio</em> (1899); and Walt Whitman's lesser-known essays and poems spanning the Civil War. In her consistently striking readings of these texts, Goode traces the nuanced yet potent ways in which sustainability rhetoric (and its whole conceptual scaffolding) evolved from the Revolutionary Era through the Progressive Era. Her conclusions—brought together in the epilogue's claim that \"agrarianism has long functioned as a kind of population control discourse focused on encouraging the fertility of rural, tacitly white bodies <strong>[End Page 175]</strong> and discouraging the fertility of racialized, seemingly polluting bodies\" (194...</p> </p>","PeriodicalId":44043,"journal":{"name":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","volume":"97 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode (review)\",\"authors\":\"Ian Finseth\",\"doi\":\"10.1353/eal.2024.a918917\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\\n<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability</em> by Abby L. Goode <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Ian Finseth (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability</em><br/> <small>abby l. goode</small><br/> University of North Carolina Press, 2022<br/> 276 pp. <p>The animating impulse of this important, well-executed study is a desire to challenge both \\\"the supposed benevolence of American environmental writing\\\" (2) and a scholarly \\\"tendency to engage with the nation's eugenic and agrarian histories separately\\\" (5). The ideals of self-reliant agricultural life and of a sustainable approach to natural resources, as twinned and potent forms of cultural discourse, turn out, in Goode's account, to be poisoned at the root. From Thomas Jefferson's encomiums to the \\\"cultivators of the earth\\\" all the way to the twenty-first century, they have been poisoned by fear—fear of overpopulation, of miscegenation, of the racial other, of moral pollution, of rampant fertility, of \\\"real Americans\\\" getting squeezed out of their rightful place. There was never some golden age of agrarian sustainability, nor even a belief in such a golden age, but rather images of disorder, degeneration, and corruption that motivated different ways of conceiving of—or fantasizing about—orderly, harmonious, and productive places and futures. These \\\"agrotopias,\\\" Goode writes, \\\"exist elsewhere, beyond the threat of demographic or agricultural decline,\\\" and they \\\"constitute attempts to revise and reclaim a long-lost agrarian ideal of 'New World' abundance\\\" (3).</p> <p>The central theoretical premise of <em>Agrotopias</em> is that sustainability rhetoric and the agrarian myth \\\"cannot be disentangled\\\" (16) from the United States' long, violent history of racism, nativism, reproductive control, and eugenics. What results is a highly effective analysis of the ways in which <strong>[End Page 174]</strong> images of the good life—a healthy relationship of the human to the environmental—are shadowed by and vitiated by a desire for racial homogeneity. Along the way, famously progressive figures, including Walt Whitman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are subject to sharp, occasionally devastating, critique. Even Michelle Obama's White House garden, in the epilogue, is implicated in the problematic legacy of Jeffersonian agrarianism. Although the book can feel repetitive in places, that repetitiveness actually comes to seem formally appropriate to the endless reinscriptions of the ideological problem Goode investigates. After reading the book, one might well ask whether there is <em>any</em> kind of environmental discourse that is not fatally compromised by the racial and reproductive legacies of the past.</p> <p>One might also ask, however, <em>why</em> we cannot disentangle these ideological strands from one another. The metaphor of \\\"entanglement\\\" is a compelling one, as it appeals to our scholarly sense that everything is complicated and nothing simple. But it is also, at the end of the day, metaphorical. Is modern American environmental discourse really so corrupted by its own dark history that it's impossible to employ the language of sustainability without invoking or reinforcing that history? Can we preserve what is virtuous about early environmental writing (whether penned by Jefferson or anyone else) without accepting what is undesirable about it? Answering such questions properly goes beyond the scope of a book review, but they are questions that readers of <em>Agrotopias</em> should ponder. And how one answers them will depend, to a significant degree, on the particular texts that one brings under the microscope.</p> <p>In that respect, Goode has chosen a fascinating combination of literary works to consider, ranging chronologically from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's <em>Letters from an American Farmer</em> (1782) through Charlotte Perkins Gilman's <em>Herland</em> (1915). Also featured are a number of unexpected entrants, including Leonora Sansay's <em>Secret History</em> (1802); Her-man Melville's <em>Pierre</em> (1852); Sutton Griggs's <em>Imperium in Imperio</em> (1899); and Walt Whitman's lesser-known essays and poems spanning the Civil War. In her consistently striking readings of these texts, Goode traces the nuanced yet potent ways in which sustainability rhetoric (and its whole conceptual scaffolding) evolved from the Revolutionary Era through the Progressive Era. Her conclusions—brought together in the epilogue's claim that \\\"agrarianism has long functioned as a kind of population control discourse focused on encouraging the fertility of rural, tacitly white bodies <strong>[End Page 175]</strong> and discouraging the fertility of racialized, seemingly polluting bodies\\\" (194...</p> </p>\",\"PeriodicalId\":44043,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE\",\"volume\":\"97 1\",\"pages\":\"\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":0.3000,\"publicationDate\":\"2024-02-12\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"1085\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918917\",\"RegionNum\":3,\"RegionCategory\":\"文学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"0\",\"JCRName\":\"LITERATURE, AMERICAN\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/eal.2024.a918917","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, AMERICAN","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
摘要
以下是内容的简要摘录,以代替摘要:评论者: Agrotopias:艾比-L.-古德(Abby L. Goode)著,伊恩-芬塞斯(Ian Finseth)(简历) Agrotopias:Abby L. Goode 北卡罗来纳大学出版社,2022 年,276 页。这本重要的、执行良好的研究报告的原动力是希望挑战 "美国环境写作中所谓的仁慈"(2)和学术界 "将美国优生史和农业史分开研究的倾向"(5)。自力更生的农业生活和自然资源可持续发展的理想,作为文化话语的孪生有力形式,在古德的论述中,从根本上被毒化了。从托马斯-杰斐逊对 "大地的耕耘者 "的赞美开始,一直到 21 世纪,它们都受到了恐惧的毒害--恐惧人口过剩、恐惧异族通婚、恐惧其他种族、恐惧道德污染、恐惧生育率飙升、恐惧 "真正的美国人 "被挤出他们应有的位置。从来没有什么农业可持续发展的黄金时代,甚至也不存在对这样一个黄金时代的信念,而是无序、堕落和腐败的形象促使人们以不同的方式构想--或者幻想--有序、和谐、富饶的地方和未来。古德写道,这些 "农业托邦""存在于其他地方,超越了人口或农业衰退的威胁",它们 "试图修正和重拾失落已久的'新世界'丰饶的农业理想"(3)。Agrotopias》的核心理论前提是,可持续发展言论和农业神话 "无法与美国漫长而暴力的种族主义、本土主义、生殖控制和优生学历史相分离"(16)。该书对美好生活的形象--人类与环境之间的健康关系--如何被种族同质化的愿望所遮蔽和削弱进行了非常有效的分析。一路走来,包括沃尔特-惠特曼和夏洛特-珀金斯-吉尔曼在内的著名进步人士都受到了尖锐的批评,有时甚至是毁灭性的批评。甚至在后记中,米歇尔-奥巴马的白宫花园也被牵扯进杰斐逊农业主义的问题遗产中。虽然书中有些地方会让人感觉重复,但实际上,这种重复在形式上似乎与古德所研究的意识形态问题的无休止的再描述是相称的。读完这本书后,人们可能会问,是否有任何一种环境论述不会受到过去种族和生殖遗产的致命损害。不过,人们也可能会问,为什么我们不能将这些意识形态的支线彼此分开呢?纠缠 "是一个令人信服的比喻,因为它迎合了我们 "一切都很复杂,没有什么是简单的 "这种学术意识。但归根结底,这也是一种隐喻。现代美国的环境话语是否真的被其自身的黑暗历史所侵蚀,以至于在使用可持续发展语言时无法不援引或强化那段历史?我们能否保留早期环境写作(无论是杰斐逊还是其他人所写)中的优点,而不接受其中的缺点?正确回答这些问题超出了书评的范围,但它们是《Agrotopias》的读者应该思考的问题。而如何回答这些问题,在很大程度上取决于将其置于显微镜下的特定文本。在这方面,古德选择了一系列引人入胜的文学作品,从赫克托-圣约翰-德-克雷夫科尔(J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur)的《一个美国农民的来信》(1782 年)到夏洛特-帕金斯-吉尔曼(Charlotte Perkins Gilman)的《赫兰》(1915 年)。此外,还有一些出人意料的作品,包括莱奥诺拉-桑赛(Leonora Sansay)的《秘史》(1802 年)、赫尔曼-梅尔维尔(Her-man Melville)的《皮埃尔》(1852 年)、萨顿-格里格斯(Sutton Griggs)的《帝国中的帝国》(1899 年)以及沃尔特-惠特曼(Walt Whitman)在南北战争期间鲜为人知的散文和诗歌。古德对这些文本的解读一贯引人注目,她追溯了可持续性修辞(及其整个概念框架)从革命时代到进步时代的微妙而有力的演变方式。她的结论汇集在后记中,即 "长期以来,农业主义一直是一种人口控制话语,其重点是鼓励农村默示白人身体的生育能力[第175页完],并阻止种族化、看似污染身体的生育能力"(第194页完...
Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode (review)
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by:
Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability by Abby L. Goode
Ian Finseth (bio)
Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability abby l. goode University of North Carolina Press, 2022 276 pp.
The animating impulse of this important, well-executed study is a desire to challenge both "the supposed benevolence of American environmental writing" (2) and a scholarly "tendency to engage with the nation's eugenic and agrarian histories separately" (5). The ideals of self-reliant agricultural life and of a sustainable approach to natural resources, as twinned and potent forms of cultural discourse, turn out, in Goode's account, to be poisoned at the root. From Thomas Jefferson's encomiums to the "cultivators of the earth" all the way to the twenty-first century, they have been poisoned by fear—fear of overpopulation, of miscegenation, of the racial other, of moral pollution, of rampant fertility, of "real Americans" getting squeezed out of their rightful place. There was never some golden age of agrarian sustainability, nor even a belief in such a golden age, but rather images of disorder, degeneration, and corruption that motivated different ways of conceiving of—or fantasizing about—orderly, harmonious, and productive places and futures. These "agrotopias," Goode writes, "exist elsewhere, beyond the threat of demographic or agricultural decline," and they "constitute attempts to revise and reclaim a long-lost agrarian ideal of 'New World' abundance" (3).
The central theoretical premise of Agrotopias is that sustainability rhetoric and the agrarian myth "cannot be disentangled" (16) from the United States' long, violent history of racism, nativism, reproductive control, and eugenics. What results is a highly effective analysis of the ways in which [End Page 174] images of the good life—a healthy relationship of the human to the environmental—are shadowed by and vitiated by a desire for racial homogeneity. Along the way, famously progressive figures, including Walt Whitman and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are subject to sharp, occasionally devastating, critique. Even Michelle Obama's White House garden, in the epilogue, is implicated in the problematic legacy of Jeffersonian agrarianism. Although the book can feel repetitive in places, that repetitiveness actually comes to seem formally appropriate to the endless reinscriptions of the ideological problem Goode investigates. After reading the book, one might well ask whether there is any kind of environmental discourse that is not fatally compromised by the racial and reproductive legacies of the past.
One might also ask, however, why we cannot disentangle these ideological strands from one another. The metaphor of "entanglement" is a compelling one, as it appeals to our scholarly sense that everything is complicated and nothing simple. But it is also, at the end of the day, metaphorical. Is modern American environmental discourse really so corrupted by its own dark history that it's impossible to employ the language of sustainability without invoking or reinforcing that history? Can we preserve what is virtuous about early environmental writing (whether penned by Jefferson or anyone else) without accepting what is undesirable about it? Answering such questions properly goes beyond the scope of a book review, but they are questions that readers of Agrotopias should ponder. And how one answers them will depend, to a significant degree, on the particular texts that one brings under the microscope.
In that respect, Goode has chosen a fascinating combination of literary works to consider, ranging chronologically from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) through Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915). Also featured are a number of unexpected entrants, including Leonora Sansay's Secret History (1802); Her-man Melville's Pierre (1852); Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio (1899); and Walt Whitman's lesser-known essays and poems spanning the Civil War. In her consistently striking readings of these texts, Goode traces the nuanced yet potent ways in which sustainability rhetoric (and its whole conceptual scaffolding) evolved from the Revolutionary Era through the Progressive Era. Her conclusions—brought together in the epilogue's claim that "agrarianism has long functioned as a kind of population control discourse focused on encouraging the fertility of rural, tacitly white bodies [End Page 175] and discouraging the fertility of racialized, seemingly polluting bodies" (194...