Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth by Alice Curry (review)

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308-312 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.

1 Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth by Alice Curry (review) Troy Boone Children's Literature, Volume 43, 2015, pp (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article Accessed 20 Nov :24 GMT

2 308 Children s Literature Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth, by Alice Curry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, Reviewed by Troy Boone Alice Curry s Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth uses an ecofeminist critical lens to investigate postapocalyptic young adult fiction, a rapidly growing genre of great importance both to studies of youth culture and to studies of contemporary environmental literature. As Curry s introduction states, in her analyses of these fictions she applies two claims central to most ecofeminist analysis: first, the claim that the exploitation of nonhuman nature is bound up with the exploitation of women; and, second, the claim that a radical response to such exploitation can be found in an ethic of care that androcentric cultures have frequently derided as feminine. Like a number of other ecofeminists and in a move especially important to childhood and youth studies, Curry seeks to encompass the child as a third category of analysis alongside women and nature (6), and Curry is, throughout her book, centrally engaged with an exploration of the ways in which young adult novels attempt to develop a sustainable ethic of care that can encompass... feminised peoples and spatialities, including nonhumans and the environment (1). Moreover, Curry unites these two foci and the literary genre she studies by arguing that this ethic of care is especially apt for engaging with the construction of young adult subjectivity in novels in which radically ruptured postapocalyptic societies struggle to create new more caring world orders based on the dismantling of social and biosocial inequalities (1) in the face of environmental disaster. Bookended by a first chapter and a conclusion that work through the poetics of apocalypse in young adult fiction, the central chapters of the book examine a range of representational matters in twenty-two postapocalyptic novels from 2000 to 2011, with especially substantial analyses of the trilogies initiated by Suzanne Collins s The Hunger Games (2008) and Carrie Ryan s The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009). The second chapter argues that in a range of postapocalyptic young adult novels the female body and the earth body are similarly denoted a blind space, subject to constructivist discourses of neoliberal individualism (44); the chapter is particularly convincing in its treatment of the ways in which, once she enters the Hunger Games, the protagonist of Collins s novel becomes a marketable product (71) yet retains her embattled agency (72). Chapter 3 examines how the development of

3 Reviews 309 an ethic of care either fails or succeeds to re-envisage the systems that produce gender difference (77) for instance, how in many cases a maternal propensity towards love, care and trust is couched in a discourse of biological essentialism rather than agential choice (84 85). The next two chapters are focused on myth and narrative: the fourth chapter examines the mythic construction of the natural world in young adult apocalyptic novels and the role of intergenerational storytelling as competition for institutional history, such as the stories propagated as official history by the matriarchal religious institution, the Sisterhood in The Forest of Hands and Teeth (118); the fifth chapter focuses on ecofeminist spiritualities, how novels negotiate their protagonists interaction with the world within and in opposition to the sociopolitical systems that secularise human-nonhuman relations (129). The sixth chapter studies how ecofeminist critiques of deep ecology are involved in contemporary young adult fiction about environmental apocalypse. Curry here argues, as do many ecofeminists, that deep ecology s abstract universalism promoting an ethereal merging of human and nonhuman selves ignores the complexity and diversity of human-nonhuman interrelations over time and across distance, and the logical and historical connections between environmental domination and other comparable forms of oppression (162); Curry in turn proposes a hybrid that can account for both deep ecology s notion of identification between humans and the natural world and ecofeminism s call for plurality of voice and ethical actant (164). Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction is generally quite compelling in its analyses of how a range of postapocalyptic young adult novels engage with concerns that are, and have long been, central to ecofeminist scholarship. However, Curry s book does have some problems, the most noteworthy being a lack of discussion of the diversity of critical views about and within the very broad field of ecofeminism. Curry merely gestures at a substantial, often controversial, critical history with the statement in her introduction, It is only fair to note that the ecofeminist movement has not been without its critics (4). In an endnote to this sentence, Curry states: See Greta Gaard (2011) for a comprehensive account of the antifeminist backlash against North American ecofeminism over the past thirty years and her useful recuperation of ecofeminist insights (199). The essay to which Curry here refers, Greta Gaard s Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism, offers a substantial history of the internal and external battles (Gaard

4 310 Children s Literature 27) involving ecofeminism, from the 1980s onwards, including the critiques of ecofeminism that were being developed by feminist environmentalists and ecofeminists alike (Gaard 35). Curry s brief gesture at the long critical history that Gaard details has the unfortunate effect of suggesting that critics of the ecofeminist movement are simply antifeminist. To be fair to Curry, Gaard s article itself does in places rhetorically conflate the firestorm of feminist backlash against ecofeminism (Gaard 40) with the antifeminist backlash against ecofeminism (Gaard 41), although the ultimate goal of Ecofeminism Revisited seems to be a description of the multiplicity of forms of ethical thought that ecofeminism has enabled: An intersectional ecological-feminist approach frames these issues in such a way that people can recognize common cause across the boundaries of race, class, gender, sexuality, species, age, ability, nation and affords a basis for engaged theory, education, and activism (Gaard 44). A fuller and more direct engagement with the complex and sometimes divisive history of ecofeminism and its critics might have resulted in some more nuanced analyses in Curry s book. For instance, the idea of a gendered ethic of care, on which so much of Curry s book focuses, has been a point of contention in feminist studies since the publication of Carol Gilligan s 1982 book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women s Development (for a summary of the contention, see Cuomo ). Similarly, many scholars working in or friendly to ecofeminism have questioned the assumption that, as Curry summarizes it, androcentrism, rather than anthropocentrism per se, must be critiqued in order to address the root cause of environmental oppression (162); as Charis Thompson observes, many women are part of groups that oppress other women in intersectional hierarchies of class and nation that cross-cut the question of ecology (510), and of course women like men contribute (for instance as consumers and polluters) to the anthropocentric exploitation and degradation of the natural world. Curry is compelling in her analysis of how, in a text like The Hunger Games, masculinist ideologies of consumerism, capitalism and globalism are implicated in the planetary consciousness that dislocates humans from their ecological embeddedness (193). In part, of course, the success of this analysis has to do with the fact that The Hunger Games specifically depicts an androcentric totalitarian regime in the form of the Capitol and its political machinations. One need not reject the ecofeminist critique of androcentrism in order to observe that The Forest of Hands and Teeth, which offers readers a female-centered totalitarian regime in

5 Reviews 311 the form of the Sisterhood and its absolutist policies, is not cut to the measure of that critique; here Curry s otherwise astute discussion of Ryan s work falters and simply labelling the Sisterhood a masculine rule (87) seems like an interpretive cop-out. More direct engagement with the history of ecofeminism and the debates it has stirred also might have emphasized what is most striking in Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction. For instance, Curry s fifth chapter, one of the best in her book, examines issues of ecofeminism and spirituality in young adult postapocalyptic fictions: more discussion of the fact that the role of spirituality in ecofeminism has long been controversial (see for instance the history provided by Glazebrook 19 21) would have given point to Curry s examination of how these young adult novels engage alternative spiritualities in negotiating their protagonists interaction with the world within and in opposition to the socio-political systems that secularise human-nonhuman relations (129). Curry s sixth chapter discusses how the novels she studies offer a hybrid engagement with viewpoints that can be identified with deep ecology (on the one hand) and ecofeminism (on the other). The debates between deep ecologists and ecofeminists go back some decades, as Gaard notes (39 40), as does hybridizing work by ecofeminists, for instance Val Plumwood s early (1992) adjudication between deep ecology and social ecology, in which she remarks that the fact that the debate between these positions is necessary and important should not obscure the fact then that much of its divisiveness is unnecessary.... The choice between reducing other critiques or being reduced by them is a false one. The barriers to a theoretical synthesis are political, not theoretical (Plumwood 225). More discussion of this history of the relations between deep ecology and ecofeminism would perhaps have enabled Curry to demonstrate what is new and original in her analysis of the theoretical hybrid she finds emerging in young adult fiction, as a more critical engagement with its theoretical methodology throughout would have enhanced what is best about Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction and its often compelling analyses of the ethical possibilities of an important genre of young adult literature in an era of environmental crisis. Works Cited Cuomo, Chris J. Feminism and Ecological Communities: An Ethic of Flourishing. London: Routledge, Print. Gaard, Greta. Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Esssentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism. Feminist Formations 23.2 (2011): Print.

6 312 Children s Literature Glazebrook, Trish. Karen Warren s Ecofeminism. Ethics and the Environment 7.2 (2002): Print. Plumwood, Val. Ecosocial Feminism as a General Theory of Oppression Ecology. Ed. Carolyn Merchant. 2nd ed. Amherst: Prometheus, Print. Thompson, Charis. Back to Nature?: Resurrecting Ecofeminism after Posthumanist and Third-Wave Feminisms. Isis 97.3 (2006): Print. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers, edited by Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz. New York: Routledge, Reviewed by David Cappella Here it comes Wait for it News flash: dystopian fiction is in. Firmly franchised now in the movie industry, it has been a distinct, important aspect of YA literature almost from the creation of the genre. So, it should not be a surprise that academic research about dystopia s connection to YAL and especially its connection to what it means to be a teenager should be on the upswing. And this is, without doubt, a good thing. At a most opportune time, riding the current crest of dystopianism now sweeping the publishing world, Hollywood and TV, Routledge has published Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers (I really do wish that the title had been reversed) as part of their Children s Literature and Culture series. Composed of twelve scholarly essays (each extremely well researched and documented), the book is organized into four distinct parts: Freedom and Constraint: Adolescent Liberty and Self-Determination ; Society and Environment: Building a Better World ; Radical or Conservative? Polemics of the Future ; and Biotechnologies of the Self: Humanity in a Posthuman Age. From the range of these four evocative thematic sections one can see that the editors of the book, Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz, have thought deeply about how to cover the topic of Dystopian YAL. Their introduction to the book is extremely informative, providing an excellent examination of how YA dystopian writing engages with pressing global concerns (1). They manage to be upbeat and idealistic about a literary genre that is often the opposite. They do this by demonstrating how didacticism and escape have a role to play in the

Environmental Ethics: From Theory to Practice

Environmental Ethics: From Theory to Practice Marion Hourdequin Companion Website Material Chapter 4 Companion website by Julia Liao and Marion Hourdequin ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE