A descriptive phrase on the back cover of Steven Swarbrick’s Environmental Unconscious perfectly captures the book’s project: it “issues a provocative challenge to ecocriticism.” The challenge is embedded in the title, which quotes, with the intention of resignifying, a concept “first introduced to ecocriticism by Lawrence Buell in 2003 to refer to preconscious or not-yet-conscious environments that go beyond human perception” (13). Buell (2001: 24, 22) takes credit for the “neologism” in Writing for an Endangered World. There he worries that attending the coinage is “the risk of [his] sounding overly mystical.” Swarbrick includes Buell’s lengthy explication of the concept (13–14), but not the risk assessment, and then paraphrases it before throwing down the gauntlet:
In Buell’s perspectival metaphor [he borrows foreshortening from the study of visual culture], the environmental unconscious recedes from view. It can, however, return in moments of awakening. In Buell’s use, the potential...
