Cirrus@Austlit

'The literary work may be ideally placed to explore animal sentience and to capture human moments of appreciation of animal sentience. Reading occurs in a space of interiority in the first instance. That is, reading is an almost immediate experience of inter-subjectivity with literary characters and representation, arguably less mediated than the use of voiceover in film or visual art representation. Shared reading such as that which occurs in book clubs shifts from a space of individual exploration and interiority to a more communal space of exploration. This paper examines the intersections between literary animal studies and research into themed book clubs through revisiting data from a small regional project conducted on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia, Ethics Approval HREC: A/ 13/439. We do so to investigate the impact of group reading on values and beliefs about nonhuman animals. This paper considers book clubs' power to facilitate and articulate pro-animal sentiment, thus contributing to more recent research establishing the cultural and psychological mechanisms behind the power of fiction to make us care for animals (Malecki et al. 2019) as well as that on book clubs as method. Here we reflect on how sociable reading of works that centralise the lives of animals, facilitates the articulation of past inter-species connections and shifts subsequent engagements with other species.' (Publication abstract)

'Yumna Kassab’s Australiana: A Novel is mostly set in an unnamed regional town, likely Tamworth, in northern NSW and in other nearby locations like Barraba, Uralla and the Pilliga. It tells of the lives of ordinary people, their relationships with the land and homes in which they dwell, the objects in which they seek solace, their hopes and losses.' (Introduction)

'The 2017 marriage equality referendum was conservative in reach—refuting the entrenched marginalisation of queer existence, a challenge to conflations of happiness (in fact, the ultimate “happily ever after”—marriage) and heteronormativity. The marriage equality debate was an ugly realisation of those discourses of exclusion and prejudice implicated in many Western values, and in Australian national identity broadly. In thinking through these issues, I return to Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Loaded (1995) for its queering of “happily ever after” myths via film referents. Ari’s paradoxical relationship to romantic tenderness is evident in his frequent first-person allusions to various films. A close reading of Loaded and the film’s allusions expose both the operation of exclusion and an individual’s response to that exclusion prior to marriage equality. Loaded invites reflection on these complexities in a call for the universal right to romantic happiness through its deployment of filmic tropes.' (Publication abstract)

'Since the mid-1990s, Australian writers have been shifting the form and function of animal representation to explore the material realities of the more-than-human as well as the violence implicit in the human/animal relationship. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of these fictive challenges, turning to a close reading of Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015). I argue that Wood’s novel operates as a taxonomic replication of some of the paradoxes and limits in contemporary, literary discourses on non-human animals. At first blush, the work’s satire of the romanticisation of animal imagery and its exposure of modernity’s entwined anthropocentricism and anthropomorphism are a challenge to the projection of human needs onto animals. Yet, the novel also deploys a symbology where animals diversely signify the female inmates and conversely pathways to freedom, a symbology that reduces the animal to a referent.'

Source: Abstract

'In Ceridwen Dovey’s short story cycle, Only the Animals, inter-textual allusions to established fictional animals are imposed onto settings of human conflict and ventriloquised through diverse animal subjects. This paper defends narrating from a non-human animal perspective, not as a radical act, but as a move to reinvigorate our conceptions of human-animal relations. Meaningful encounters between human and non-human animals are presented with a recognition of the impossibility of full and mutual inter-species understanding. The juxtaposition of the limits of figuring literary animals with human/animal intimacy and incomprehension marks Dovey’s work as a logical progression of some ideas presented in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. This paper reads Dovey’s deployment of textual self-referentiality and overt intersection with Coetzee’s work in Only the Animals as a reflexive writing form that works to critique another representational dispossession: that of anthropocentric realism. Both works understand that humans do not share language with non-human animals but we often meet questions of the animal through stories. This makes the stories we tell highly significant; indeed – vital – components of the cultural landscape.'

Source: Abstract.

'David Malouf's oeuvre is characterised by a specific treatment of the natural world. Malouf’s sensitivity towards nature is very present in 'Remembering Babylon', inspired by the true story of Gemmy Morrill, ‘lost’ in the ‘wilds’, the novel framed by epigraphs drawn from Romantic poetry. This paper seeks to re-examine this treatment through an ecocritical lens. That is, I seek to explore the novel in terms of its redress of denigrating, exploitative, or idealistic views of human relationships with the non-human natural realm.

'Remembering Babylon' pits characters’ interactions with the natural world in diverse ways and the culminating impression is far from idealistic or apolitical. Ultimately, the novel’s complex rendering of human relationships with place and the non-human animal offers a specific challenge to romanticised visions of place. This argument is counter to some criticism of the novel as idealisation of the natural world at the expense of historically salient political considerations.

''Remembering Babylon' explores the significant political issue of human attitudes to the natural realm in complex ways. In order to reconsider the criticism of idealism, the novel is examined in terms of the genre most closely associated with idealisation of the environment: the pastoral. 'Remembering Babylon' appears to have a complex relationship with what can loosely be termed ‘the pastoral’. The novel revises idealising visions of nature and gently parodies the notion that nature is separate from or a tool of human, cultural concerns, particularly through its figurative and literal foregrounding of the nonhuman animal. The epigraph provides a deliberate and significant signal of Malouf’s challenge to pastoral understandings of nature because the poets cited within it, William Blake and John Clare, arguably offer in their wider body of work what might be termed a post-pastoral ethos that evokes, challenges and thus adapts pastoral idealism of nature. The paper suggests that 'Remembering Babylon' expresses such a post-pastoral ethos, if in a very different context and form from Blake and Clare.' (Publication abstract)

Since Thomas More's first use of the word utopia in 1516 it has conjured multiple and ambiguous connotations. Utopia and its defining antithesis dystopia can be articulations of what we wish to become or to avoid becoming, an investigation of hope and the potential for transformation. Utopias can evoke dichotomies between the liberal realisation and the impossible ideal (Kumar 1991); or a contrast between the concrete and closed social plan as opposed to the impetus toward hope in the small details of various cultural contexts (Jameson 2006).

(Source : Social Alternatives : Utopias Dystopias : Alternative Visions, 2009)