Reviews for The original eye

The average rating for The original eye based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-11-24 00:00:00 Paul Hoare Edited by Michael Bennett and David W. Teague; I read the introduction, the interview with Andrew Ross (of techno-culture studies fame; chapter 2), and the one essay on the underground of the city (chapter 13). Introduction: here they lay out in brief the questions (though not the answers) asked in the essays, seeking to fill the urban gap in the recent cultural/ecological studies movement (social ecology, eco-criticism -- basically, an attention to the dual unknowableness of nature and its systematic organization: there are rules, we just don't know them; it's a system, it's just not organized for us). The introduction is uninteresting and untheoretical, though they do the right thing by giving an actual overview of the many, disparate topics/essays covered in the book: nature-writing in the city, city parks, the urban wilderness (where the natives are savages -- a long-standing trope of both racial and industrial discourse, cf. Slotkin on The Fatal Environment), feminist ecocriticism, and theorizing urban space. "The Social Claim on Urban Ecology," Andrew Ross (interviewed by Michael Bennett), pp. 15-30: Ross is a techno-cultural studies person, so his interest in eco-criticism seems a good way to start this off with a reminder that technology and the city are parts of our nature. He goes through some of the motions with good will, reminding us of the strange bedfellows of ecological politics (white flight often goes together with the preservation of green land -- people preserve green land from black families [16]). Ross is against the Chicago School of sociology, claiming that they look to socially-constructed images of nature to buttress their sociological arguments/observations, a criticism that is part of his push for a New (socially just) Urbanism, a pluralist movement (not all environmentalists are the same [28], and environmentalism cannot be a single-issue topic for him [17, 19, 22]); most curiously, his Green Urbanism is a post-scarcity image, a reminder that all scientific constructions are scientism, inextricable from the cultural moment (25), and our desire to limit our desires is not something we can implement safely without examination (27). (I especially like his note that post-scarcity has become a dirty word: "People look at you as if you had two heads" [26].) Joanne Gottlieb, "Darwin's City, or Life Underground," pp. 233-254: between her quick and uninteresting readings of Wells, "The Host" (The X-Files' fluke-man episode), 12 Monkeys, etc., Gottlieb does make some interesting remarks on the underground's multiple valences in the city: both the place we shovel everything we don't want to deal with (basically, shit and the dead) and our hope for rationally dealing with that (segregating and rationalizing each element) and our fears of what would happen if that rationalizing/segregating broke down. Aggravatingly, her interest in the utopian frisson of the underground is expressed in two areas, the underground train and the sewer, and the former structures her imagination (time that goes forwards or backwards or nowhere at all) when her most interesting remarks are about the latter (as for instance, in the comparison between the visceral "porcelain telephone" network of Newark in "The Host" and the agents' ephemeral cell phone connections [239]). Ultimately, she concludes that we've lost the ability to imagine the city and the ability to imagine the future (hence, the utopian urge of the late 90s found its way into cyberspace, where everything was rational).

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-23 00:00:00 Kenneth Shadford Until I read this collection of essays, I thought ecocriticism focused on literature, but more of these are about politics and society than about texts of any kind. The editors' introduction establishes the broad focus: they want ecocritics to consider urban environments, and they want city dwellers to remember "our place within ecosystems and the importance of this fact for understanding urban life and culture" (4). Some of the essays are text-based, particularly the three in the section devoted to "Urban Nature Writing": Gary Roberts's examination of walking in London in 18th-century and earlier poetry is interesting, and so is Joanne Gottlieb's comparison of 19th-century utopian and dystopian texts with 20th-century ones including an X-Files episode. The last essay, by Michael Branch, focuses on the simulacra of nature in a casino to show that in 21st-century America, the "nature" of cities has been replaced by more convenient, "hyperreal" fakes, and thus provides a fascinating but distressing conclusion to the volume.