A thoughtful consideration by Harrison (French and Italian
Literature/Stanford) of the role that forests have played in the
cultural imagination of the West. Though avowedly "selective" - "I
wanted to avoid at all costs a mere encyclopedic catalog of the
forest theme" - Harrison's inquiry ranges wide, from Dionysus
through Dante and Descartes to Thoreau, Frank Lloyd Wright, and
Samuel Beckett - whose bleak essentialism, the author says, better
reflects our depleted times than does James Joyce's "luxuriant
forest of prose." Beginning with 18th-century Italian theorist
Giovanni Battista Vico's imagining that the origin of human thought
and institutions began with forest-dwelling giants, Harrison shows
how the founding legends of Rome looked back to the forest, as the
opposite of city and civilization, with a paradoxical mix of
reverence and hostility that continues today. Reaching further
back, to the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, Harrison points out its
hero's destructive impulse toward the forest in response to an
agonizing consciousness of death; later, the author ingeniously
identifies the Greek goddess Artemis with the related roots of the
words for matter, wood, forest, and mother. From the Christian
analogy of forests with darkness, bestiality, and perdition, he
gets to the Grimm brothers' nostalgic "philological mystification"
of German forests in their association with a lost cultural and
national unity. As for current concerns about deforestation and
ecology, the author demonstrates that these attitudes, "which we do
not fully understand," have extensive buried and tangled roots.
Harrison's original and perspicacious excavation brings cultural
resonance and suggestive thought to today's ecological issues.
(Kirkus Reviews)
In this wide-ranging exploration of the role of forests in Western
thought, Robert Pogue Harrison enriches our understanding not only
of the forest's place in the cultural imagination of the West, but
also of the ecological dilemmas that now confront us so urgently.
Consistently insightful and beautifully written, this work is
especially compelling at a time when the forest, as a source of
wonder, respect, and meaning, disappears daily from the earth.
""Forests" is one of the most remarkable essays on the human place
in nature I have ever read, and belongs on the small shelf that
includes Raymond Williams' masterpiece, "The Country and the City."
Elegantly conceived, beautifully written, and powerfully argued,
"Forests"] is a model of scholarship at its passionate best. No one
who cares about cultural history, about the human place in nature,
or about the future of our earthly home, should miss it.--William
Cronon, "Yale Review"
""Forests" is, among other things, a work of scholarship, and one
of immense value . . . one that we have needed. It can be read and
reread, added to and commented on for some time to come."--John
Haines, "The New York Times Book Review"
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