2012 · volume 130 · number 1

AnGliA
JournAl oF enGliSH PHiloloGY
ZeitScHriFt Für enGliScHe PHiloloGie

editorS
Lucia Kornexl
Ursula Lenker
Martin Middeke
Gabriele Rippl
Hubert Zapf

AdviSorY boArd
Laurel Brinton Derek Attridge
Philip Durkin Elisabeth Bronfen
Olga Fischer Ursula K. Heise
Susan Irvine Verena Lobsien
Andrew James Johnston Laura Marcus
Christopher A. Jones J. Hillis Miller
Terttu Nevalainen Martin Puchner

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128 BESPRECHUNGEN

interesting and impressive sections of the book dealing with the “cultural produc-
tions” (chapter title) of these four authors have to do with their – partially newly
found, in all cases newly defined – Jewish identity. Probably the most impressive
fiction discussed in this book and a true find, the still largely unpublished hundreds
of short stories by Carl Weiselberger, deals precisely with the European Jewish
past. These writers “are hardly ever engaged in representations of Jewish Canadian
realities but very much in those of Jewish worlds lost” (181).
Of course one can, as Banauch does, interpret this as writing from a transcul-
tural angle, but the sophisticated interpretations provided in this book are best when
taking the Jewish angle. When they attempt to accentuate transcultural dimensions,
they often remain on the level of content and do not approach a more complex
literary analysis. This, of course, is not surprising – I know very few examples
where transculturality has actually been demonstrated as a method on the level of
the literary discourse – the language – itself. Not even the most obvious question,
that of language shift, has been adequately addressed.
Charmingly, Banauch also provides a list of “to do’s” for research in “German
Canadian Exile Studies”, mainly a series of names to be considered, including Er-
nest Bornemann, the multi-talented author of Das Patriarchat, sex and jazz re-
searcher and novelist, who lived in Canada from 1940 until 1950. Beyond its sta-
tus as a list with helpful suggestions for future researchers, this section also proves
the significance of the area Eugen Banauch has chosen for himself. This is a very
significant book opening up new ways of thinking about authors we need to either
get to know or re-evaluate. It is a true experience.

DORTMUND WALTER GRÜNZWEIG

Betsy v a n S c h l u n. Science and the Imagination: Mesmerism, Media and the

Mind in Nineteenth-Century English and American Literature. Leipzig Explora-
tions in Literature and Culture 13. Glienicke/Berlin and Madison/Wisconsin: Galda
& Wilch, 2007, € 68.00.

There are books you open and immediately know that they will become important
for your day to day work. You will turn to them regularly, use them as assign-
ments for students or suggest them as secondary literature for term papers. The
reason is not necessarily theoretical brilliance or a completely new approach to
literary studies – that they are up to the best standards of literary research goes
without mentioning. But their fascination is quite simply in the information they
provide: precise, comprehensive, accessible, and highly useful information.
The problem for students, and not only for students, in understanding literature
of earlier times lies famously not in difficult terms and concepts but in those words
that seem to be familiar, words that we use everyday without thinking. Of course,
we all know what ‘sad’ means, but when Antonio announces that he is sad in the
first line of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, we feel that our usual understand-
ing does not seem to fit. You are not ‘sad’ when you have ships out on the ocean
but ‘uneasy’, ‘apprehensive’, ‘worried’, ‘troubled’ or even ‘alarmed’. Once we fol-
low up on the various meanings of ‘sad’ and become aware of the concept(s) of
melancholy, not only the manifold meanings of a single word come suddenly into
play, but also the Renaissance discourses on medicine, philosophy, astronomy etc.

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 BESPRECHUNGEN 129
‘Mesmerism’, and even more the verb ‘mesmerize’, are not quite as simple as
‘sad’, but familiar enough to draw responses along the lines of ‘associated com-
monplaces’ ranging from charlatanry and superstition to charms and seduction.
But retrospective projections of our knowledge are frequently fallacious, and what
is hocus-pocus now may once well have been the objective of serious scientific re-
search and even tested within the theoretical and methodological framework and
with the precision available. In consequence, the distinction between realism and
the fantastic may change once we take into account that phenomena now deemed
to be supernatural were seriously explored by at least some scientists with the new
instruments and technologies at hand and explained within the framework of phy-
sics or medicine. It is a truism that new scientific discoveries are frequently re-
garded not as a break with the past but as an affirmation of previously held be-
liefs. Radioactive decay seemed to confirm the tenets of alchemy and the
transformation of matter, and when Niels Bohr first suggested his atomic model in
analogy to the planetary solar system, Max Born saw it as a resurrection of the
similarity between microcosm and macrocosm. In the context of electromagnetism
and new discoveries in telecommunication Betsy van Schlun points out that “while
on the one hand the new technologies were seen as spooky, on the other hand
spiritualistic phenomena were explained scientifically through electric and magnetic
forces, and such a reputable scientist as Faraday wrote on table turning and de-
vised an instrument for detecting the physical muscular forces that he wanted to
prove were at work during a séance” (267f.).
Science and the Imagination first offers an overview of mesmerism from its in-
ception in the second half of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century.
Betsy van Schlun carefully disentangles the web of interwoven discourses on mes-
merism and the various related phenomena from medical treatment to clairvoyance
and the ink mirror, from love-magnetism to trance, hypnosis, somnambulism, vir-
tual travels and spiritualism. She then turns to a host of case studies in which the
various developments and discussions are investigated. Hawthorne, Poe, Howell
and James, Bulwer-Lytton, Dickens, Eliot, Collins, Kipling and Wells, to name only
the most important ones, are analysed for their respective views of, and literary
explorations into, mesmerism, and even if a few names are missing from the index
– Melville comes to mind – the list is extensive and covers almost completely the
hall of fame of 19th century Anglophone authors plus a few less canonized writers.
Frequently, the underlying concepts are not even mentioned in the texts as the con-
temporary audience was certainly expected to be familiar with the various aspects
of mesmerism anyway, and the study demonstrates convincingly how seemingly
unrelated major or minor textual elements or facets rely on, and contribute to, the
complex exchange of information between the various discourses.
The book is rounded off with a glance at recent resurrections of themes pre-
viously covered by the larger concept of mesmerism – in the movies there are the
virtual travels of the Matrix-trilogy, the spiritualistic motifs in The Sixth Sense,
and the role of hypnosis in The Curse of the Jade Scorpion; in fiction we find
Brian O’Doherty’s The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. or Peter Sloterdijk’s Der
Zauberbaum, and other examples will readily come to mind. Even in the sciences,
phenomena that were once part and parcel of mesmerism may resurface in new
guises, and research into various forms of magnetism and the potentials of mag-
netic fields is far from obsolete. Betsy van Schlun’s book is thus also a reminder
that the history of ideas is a continuous process, in the course of which the expla-
nations of phenomena, real or imaginary, may shift back and forth between reli-
gion and science, common knowledge and occultism. But most importantly it

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130 BESPRECHUNGEN

opens the way for a better understanding of the literature of the 19th century in a
way that is fascinating to read not only for scholars but also for students.

JENA DIRK VANDERBEKE

Timothy C l a r k. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment.

Cambridge Introductions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011, xiv +
254 pp., £ 55.00 hb/£ 15.99 pb.

The title of this volume, Literature and the Environment, may at first seem to indi-
cate a more traditional ecocritical focus on environmentally themed fiction and
nature writing, but it proves a flexible choice that allows the inclusion of a wide
range of diverging critical approaches to environmental crisis in a broad sense. In-
deed, the study points out that, considering the ultimately inconceivable apocalyp-
tic potential of phenomena like climate change and overpopulation, the lack of any
“recognized” and standardized bundle of methods may ultimately be one of eco-
criticism’s salient qualities: “the unprecedented challenge ... may be the need, literally,
to think everything, even to think everything at once” (203).
What characterizes ecocriticism, then, is the attempt to overcome boundaries be-
tween disciplines and forms of “knowing” the world that have long been consid-
ered incompatible, in an effort not only to restructure the relationship of the cul-
tural to the natural world, but also to reconsider what these very concepts might
mean. Clark emphasizes that what is called into question is nothing less than “the
now dominant liberal humanist conception of the human self” (65), along with its
ideas of individual liberty and individual rights. This is a bold and far-reaching
statement that needs careful differentiation, especially in an introductory work:
while we unquestionably have to rethink what deserves to be recognized as a
“right”, few ecocritics would wish to abolish the concept itself. Likewise, although
the author is right that environmental damage cannot be kept in check without
effective legislation and an “engagement with those national and global structures
of economics and forms of government that are ultimately more responsible” (136)
than individual lifestyle decisions, this should not lead us to make light of our
own, individual, share of responsibilities.
Giving an introduction to so polymorphic a field is a tricky task, even more so
as the author announces in his preface that he aims for “a tighter synthesis” than
the existing essay collections were able to achieve, a “lucid conceptual introduction
more familiar to other schools of literary or cultural theory” (xiii). But Clark does
indeed meet the challenge. Manageably structured into an introductory outline of
the field of study plus twenty concise, thematic chapters, each about ten pages in
length, and written in a highly readable style that still tries to avoid reductions and
provoke thought, the book is certainly a suitable source for students wishing to get
a general overview of the subject area. Lists of further reading, a detailed index
and highlighted boxes with additional examples and explanations, as well as so-
called “quandaries” (ongoing critical debates and unresolved conflicts), contribute
to its user-friendly lucidity.
In terms of content, the volume makes a point of demonstrating the wide scope
of concerns connected with the study of literature and the environment, dealing
with issues that range from romanticism to postcolonialism, and from politics to
ethics and philosophy. However, both the selection of topics and the positions

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