摘要：For Heather Houser contemporary fiction's ability to make us feel about our bonds to the environment is central to its ability to make us act; it can 'ferry us from awareness to an obligation to respond' to our 'environmentally precarious present' (24). This stirring to engage is peculiar to what she terms 'ecosickness' fiction, a strand of recent literary texts that document the interdependence of somatic and ecological sickness through the hazardous but productive realm of affect. Hazardous because, as Houser is at pains to note, 'the same emotions that bring us to awareness might orient responses in uninvited ways' (16). Affect, in other words, is as likely to stymie as it is to inspire environmental action. Yet 'as sandboxes for ideas of agency rather than fixed treatises on it' (18-19), works of ecosickness are a valuable laboratory in which to test, interrogate and transform attitudes towards what Houser, quoting David Foster Wallace, describes as '"today's diseased now"' (228).
