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Timothy Clark's research to date has been in the fields of phenomenology and deconstruction, and this Continental bias registers in The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment: it is organized around “quandaries”—of anthropocentrism and language, of political legitimacy, etc.—which form anticonclusions to most of the thematic chapters. The subtle and detailed readings, such as that of A River Runs Through It, reveal the tensions and contradictions beloved of poststructuralist thought; even the “realism” defended by Lawrence Buell is re-read, intriguingly, as “more strictly the gesture of breaking apart received projections or constructions of natural things in order to affirm their sheer acultural otherness” (47). This potentially enervating strategy succeeds brilliantly in conveying the intellectual excitement of ecocriticism, and Clark's demonstrations that simple solutions are elusive—or delusive—never undermine the necessity of seeking them. Unsurprisingly, his analysis is Morton-esque, as when Clark sets out the contrast between Jonathan Bate's Romantic Ecology and Timothy Morton's critique of Romantic consumerism. Clark's reading of Frankenstein is explicitly indebted to Ecology without Nature, arguing that Victor's anguished “moralism recoils from the more uncomfortable possibility that there may be no natural moral order to transgress” (69). Elsewhere, Clark criticizes Morton's appropriation of Darwin for “queer ecology,” pointing out that “the intellectual jumps made in Morton's work … , from molecular biology to a familiar social ethic, are huge ones” (169). Clark's book is more readable than Ecology without Nature and more patient and careful than The Ecological Thought, but the tension between the disruptive energy of critique and the need for provisional certainties in politics and pedagogy ought to have been acknowledged. I can see the difference between deconstructive irony and corrosive skepticism, but citizens and students might not.
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