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Arnaud Barras (International) assertion Arnaud Barras i(9264189 works by)
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1 Ecopoetic Encounters : Amnesia and Nostalgia in Alexis Wright's Environmental Fiction Arnaud Barras , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , no. 5 2015; (p. 54-67) 'In Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013), Alexis Wright establishes an allegorical mode where she reimagines Europeans' first encounters with Australia from an Aboriginal environmental perspective. In this narrative system, the discovery of Australia is not realised by exploring colonisers, but by vulnerable strangers who apprehend the continent both experientially and linguistically. In Carpentaria, the Stranger-figure of Elias Smith is left amnesic after surviving a shipwreck during a cyclone; his first encounter with Australia is extremely violent and results in a loss of personal (hi)story. In The Swan Book, the character of Bella Donna seeks refuge in the nostalgia of swan stories after the disappearance of her native lands due to climate change; her first encounter with Australia is characterised by slow violence and results in a profusion of stories. In this essay I argue that by drawing attention to the interweaving of language and experience and by dramatising the relationship between organism and environment, ‘ecopoetic encounters’ allows readers to rediscover major episodes of Australian environmental history. Indeed, through the experiential and poetic meetings of Stranger-figures with Australia, Wright does not depict the initial moment of discovery as a nation-building event; rather she re-narrates it as a counterdiscursive episode of environmental historical rediscovery. Journeys of migration, environment transformations, and the marginalisation of populations are translated in an Aboriginal allegorical mode that allows European readers, through self-reflexivity, to rediscover the Australian continent through the perceptions, actions and emotions of Stranger-figures.' (Publication abstract)
1 The Law of Storytelling : The Hermeneutics of Relationality in Alexis Wright's The Swan Book Arnaud Barras , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 3 2015; 'In this paper I argue that Alexis Wright's novel The Swan Book (2013) establishes a hermeneutics of relationality that complicates the genre of Australian literature by aestheticising its transnational quality. Through the interplay of foreign swan stories told by the European migrant Bella Donna and local country swamp stories embodied in the Aboriginal protagonist Oblivia, Wright questions the origins and nature of Australian literature. In other words, The Swan Book suggests to its readers that Australian literature, from its production to its reception, transgresses national and spatial boundaries. In light of The Swan Book, the genre of Australian literature can no longer be located precisely within the borders of the continent, but has to be understood in relation to the world. In the first part of the essay, I briefly draw on concepts of hermeneutics and relationality to show how the novel creates an interpretive matrix whose function is to enmesh Aboriginal storytelling in Australian literature. In the second part of the essay, I analyse the manifestations of the hermeneutics of relationality, which takes the form of self-reflexive episodes that dramatise the process of interpretation. Ultimately, I argue that self-reflexivity is so powerful in the novel, and that Wright reproduces, varies, corrects and changes the rules and scope of Australian literature to such an extent and with such an aesthetic impact that the story of Oblivion Ethyl(ene) may in effect be the first brush of a horizon change in the literary landscape of Australian literature.' (Publication abstract)
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