AustLit

'The thesis comprises a collection of short fiction, Maps for the Lost, and a critical essay, “Human / Nature Ecotones: Climate Change and the Ecological Imagination.” In ecological terms, areas of interaction between adjacent ecosystems are known as ecotones. Sites of relationship between biotic communities, they are charged with fertility and evolutionary possibility. While postcolonial scholarship is concerned with borders as points of cross-cultural contact, ecocritical thought focuses upon the ecotone that occurs at the interface between human and non-human nature.

'In their occupation of the liminal zones between human and natural realms, the characters and narratives of Maps for the Lost reveal and nurture the porosity of conventional demarcations. In the title story, a Czech artist maps the globe by night in order to find his lover. The buried geographies of human landscapes coalesce with those of the non-human realm: the territories of wolves and the scent-trails of a fox mingle imperceptibly with nocturnal Prague and the ransacked villages of post-war Croatia. In “Seeds,” a narrative structured around the process of biological growth, the lost memories of an elderly woman are returned to her by her garden. “The Skin of the Ocean” traces the obsession of a diver who sinks his yacht under the weight of coral and fish, while in “Drift,” an Iranian refugee writes letters along the tide-line of a Tasmanian beach.

'The essay identifies the inadequacy of literature and literary scholarship’s response to the threat of climate change as a failure of the imagination, reflecting the transgressive dimension of the crisis itself, and the dualistic legacy which still informs Western discourse on non-human nature. In order to redress this shortfall, which I argue the current generations of writers have an urgent moral responsibility to do, it is critical that we learn to understand the natural world of which we are a part, in ways that cast off the limitations of conventional representation. Paradoxically, it is the profoundly disruptive (apocalyptic?) nature of the climate crisis itself, which may create the imaginative traction for that shift in comprehension, forcing us, through loss, to interpret the world in ways that have been forgotten, or are fundamentally new. By analysing Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, and Les Murray’s “Presence” sequence, the essay explores the correlation between imaginative and ecological processes, and the role of voice, embodiment, patterning and story in negotiations of nature and place. In the context of the asymptotical essence of the relation between text and world, and the paradox of phenomenological representation, it calls for a deeper cultural engagement with scientific discourse and indigenous philosophy, in order to illuminate the multiplicity and complexity of human connections to the non-human natural world' (Thesis summary)

'This thesis is a study of the representations of mothers and mother figures as found in five contemporary (published between 1984 and 1999) novels for teenagers. The focus is on western constructions of motherhood, as both normalising and universalising discourses. Utilising a variety of critical approaches this thesis examines the socio-cultural issues present in the novels in conjunction with western models of maternity. This study argues the category of mother is interdependent upon the category of child. As children's literature often focuses on the development of the child, the mother figures are often read as the “unconscious” of the texts. I examine the extent to which the mother figures are given a "subject-in-processness" (Lucas, 1998, p.39) subjectivity. The texts considered are The Changeover (First published in 1984) by Margaret Mahy; Greylands (1997) by lsobelle Carmody; Speaking to Miranda (First published in 1990) by Caroline Macdonald: Touching earth lightly (1996) by Margo Lanagan and Closed, Stranger (1999) by Kate De Goldi. In part, the selection of the texts has been based upon the various and multifaceted relationships between the mothers and the children. I use the Mahy text as a means to establish selected mother and, to a lesser degree, child characteristics. Some comparisons are made with this sole text of the 19805, in order to ascertain if there has been an evolution in the articulation of mother, figures in the 1990s. This study does not adopt a survey approach nor does it claim that the five novels present all the categories of "mother". Rather it addresses categories such as, mother as nurturer, as sexual being and, importantly, the dichotomy of the “good/​bad" mother. Within western discourses of maternity, this latter category is still used as a model by which to label women who mother. This study considers the stability of this binary within the novels. This thesis relies upon close reading of the primary texts. The emphasis is on critical approaches that draw attention to contexts, with particular emphasis on the socio-cultural issues present in each particular novel. My readings suggest that there is the possibility for engagement with the texts' social content/​comment, in conjunction with the representations of western models of maternity. I draw from a variety of motherhood discourses and theoretical approaches, including amongst others, the work of Luce Irigaray, HeIene Cixous, Judith Hennan, Martha Fineman, Rose Lucas, and Robyn McCallum.'

Source: Abstract.