Thought’s Wilderness
While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made.
Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "world-surrounding ether." Further, he explains how nature's vanishing—its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension—became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness—a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world.
Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.
"This is a vital, eloquent, and necessary book, which scholars of romanticism and ecocriticism will be engaging for years to come."—Jonathan Sachs, Concordia University
"Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature... is a fine contribution to current materialist discourse, which, in this case, engages in a critique of industrial capitalism, as Ellermann advances a 'romantic poetics of wilderness,' suggesting nature is at the 'threshold of apprehension.'"—Dewey W. Hall, Nineteenth-Century Contexts
"Greg Ellermann's Thought's Wilderness is an ambitious work of Romanticism studies that explores how human consciousness impacts the natural world."—Johannah King-Slutzky, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
"By providing a unique perspective on the relationship between nature, society, and consciousness, Thought's Wilderness offers insight into the limitations of capitalism and the potential for alternative ways of relating to nature. In all, Ellermann's work is a thorough and thought-provoking literary study that explores how capitalist societies grapple with the idea of nature. This work demonstrates the importance of romanticism and its ability to show how the concept of nature is fundamental to understanding the natural world."—Paige Figanbaum, H-Environment
"Greg Ellermann's short but impressively ambitious Thought's Wilderness... seeks to reconcile the traditions of Marxist thought, idealist philosophy, and Romantic poetics to the central goal of ecocriticism, which is to make room for nature.... Its success lies in the consistency of its focus and force of its thesis, and most of all through the striking and welcome clarity of its prose. Ellermann eschews jargon of all kinds, and finds eloquence in brevity. In short, this book is an actual pleasure to read, and when was the last time you said that about the work of a young, ambitious, theory-devoted critic?"—Onno Oerlemans, Modern Philology
"Greg Ellermann's Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature contributes to the ever-vibrant field of Romantic ecocriticism with a provocative combination of critical theory and Romantic poetics."—Eric Gidal, The Wordsworth Circle
"[An] incisive and sophisticated book.... Ellerman's poetics of wilderness—defined by 'withdrawal' and a 'consent to distance'—offers a notable precedent for contemporary practices of rewilding, which involve both active management and careful withdrawal, an act of 'letting be'."—Tobias Menley, Genre
"Thought's Wilderness makes a notable contribution to ecocritical studies of Romanticism, especially in its constellating of poetics and philosophy, and complements recent scholarship on wild Romanticism, Romantic nature, and capitalism."—Amanda Blake Davis, The Year's Work in English Studies
"Ellermann helpfully leads the reader through some quite complex philosophical ideas before applying them to perhaps more familiar literary texts, creating enlightening new readings, and his masterful command of prose and frequent recourse to signposting and recapitulation, makes a complex argument accessible."—Hilary Bedder, Green Letters
