AustLit

'The aim of this paper will be to explore the insidious moves by which human discourse transforms the nonhuman world from an existing alterity to a dead object. The objective will then be to trace paths by which we can potentially make space again for the oikos/eco, the home, to exist. As such, it is an objective that can be identified with a multiplicity of discursive formations—literature, philosophy, anthropology—all of which are threads that intertwine in an orientation that must needs also be political since it is openly conducted with an ecocritical stance (though not a predetermined agenda). The ecocritical methodology I adopt is ultimately premised on the comparative principle of combination or contamination of discourses and against their separation into strict, “pure” forms. In the same vein, this reflects the understanding of the world implied by Tim Ingold's term “meshwork,” as a more accurate description of the “entangled lines of life, growth, movement” (Ingold 63), rather than the commonly used term “network,” which would imply discrete, “interacting entities” (Ingold 63). These paths to be then traced are really a form of relation to the earth as world expressed in poetic and philosophical language; such a relationality is first and foremost a way of imagining and experiencing being that decenters the human while relying nonetheless on a human form of expression for its achievement...' (Publication summary)