Issue Details: First known date: 2012... 2012 Submerging the Imperial Eye : Affective Narration as Environmentalist Intervention in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In Richard Flanagan's novel, Death of a River Guide, the narrator, river guide Aljaz Cosini, occupies an unusual position; throughout the novel, he remains underwater, drowning in Tasmania's Franklin River. Bringing postcolonial analyses of the novel form into conversation with ecofeminist critiques of rationalist constructions of the human, I contend that Flanagan uses the position of his narrator to deliver a critique of the imperial eye and the rationalist construction of the human that it manifests, revealing their complicity in reinforcing an illusion of human separation from non-human nature that has destructive environmental consequences. Affect scholarship provides a framework for studying the alternative model that Flanagan provides as he narrates Aljaz's "visions" in ways that force a rethinking of the human in non-reductive, non-binary terms that preserve the relationality between mind and body, human and non-human nature. Attending to Flanagan's narrative strategies in the context of Tasmanian environmental history and Flanagan's environmental activism, I contend that his novel constitutes an environmentalist intervention that demands increased attention to the role that constructions of the human play in our relationships with non-human nature and to the role that novels can play in perpetuating or challenging destructive understandings of the human.' (Author's abstract)

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Last amended 27 Jun 2012 12:19:24
265-279 Submerging the Imperial Eye : Affective Narration as Environmentalist Intervention in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guidesmall AustLit logo Journal of Commonwealth Literature
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