Reviews for American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Spector of Vietnam

The average rating for American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Spector of Vietnam based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-02 00:00:00 Clayton Collins As evident in the book's title, Glen Love is motivated by a preference for the practicality afforded by the biological sciences, and "to join humanistic thinking to the empirical spirit of the sciences" (7). Love's positivist echoes of New Criticism are not an accident. Attempting to bridge the infamous schism that erupted during the "Science Wars" of the 1990s (exemplified by the Sokal affair), and taking its cues from E.O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould, Practical Ecocriticism argues for a greater degree of scientific literacy among scholars in the humanities, particularly in evolutionary biology. Love sees the sciences as exhibiting a greater degree of self-scrutiny than the humanities, where "overstating the evidence or obfuscating reality often enjoys a free ride" (45). The text offers an astute, timely critique of some veins of contemporary critical theory for their linguistic obfuscation and "extreme subjectivity" (25). However, Love is perhaps too hasty to dismiss the insights of theory wholesale, and the alternative he suggests'that academic disciplines will eventually merge in Wilson's concept of the consilience'can feel troublingly close to a teleological, totalizing view of knowledge that poststructuralist criticism was largely motivated to critique. Love's particular ecocritical application tends to lean on biographical and historicist interpretation as much as it is biologically inflected, as he analyzes Cather, Hemingway, and Howells from his practical perspective. More impressive, I think, is the chapter "Et in Arcadia Ego," where he deftly weaves together historical, cultural, literary, and biological threads to recover the often-maligned traditional pastoral mode and expose its ecologically sensible, Classical roots.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-04-11 00:00:00 Darby Butler I like Boruch's own poems, and I liked her essays in this book: thoughtful, personal and scholarly without being stuffy.