'A Buddhist monk and Zen poet named Huineng wrote a gatha, or poem, more than a thousand years ago. The poem, 'There Was no Tree to the Bodhi', was essentially about how the purity of enlightenment would not be corrupted by the dust particles of life. The four-line poem ends by asking, 'Where then was the dust?'' (Publication abstract)

'This article considers Alexis Wright's novel The Swan Book (2013) and argues that the text's difficulty, which recalls literary modernism, should be understood as a Latourian affordance. An affordance is a quality that facilitates interaction between objective and subjective elements within readerly networks. To analyze this affordance, we examine two influential accounts of literary difficulty: George Steiner's (1978) conceptual schema of four kinds of difficulty (contingent, modal, tactical and ontological) and Leonard Diepeveen's (2003) historicised account of modernist difficulty and the various rhetorical claims made about its value. We counterpoise these accounts with an analysis of 99 Goodreads reviews of The Swan Book. We find that many Goodreads reviews foreground affective and social qualities, in which difficulty becomes a shared problem for readers. They thereby resist the traditional imperative to aesthetic judgment and offer a new set of aesthetic responses to difficulty, which we term post-critical reviews.' (Publication abstract)

'Non-human animals feature prominently in Alexis Wright's novel, The Swan Book. In addition to the avian creatures of the novel's title, The Swan Book includes representations of fish, owls, mynas, brolgas, rats, cats, dogs, and snakes. Building on previous scholarship into the novel's focus on non-human species, this article explores the centrality of multi-species being and interconnectedness within an Indigenous cosmological framework. The Swan Book demonstrates the pivotal role of non-human animals in communicating the ancestral stories and historical knowledge of Aboriginal nations. As a result, an Indigenous worldview centred on the notion of Country is presented as a potential solution to current environmental challenges in our world. The article also draws attention to the muteness of Oblivia, the central character of Wright's novel. Employing concepts from disability studies and critical animal studies, the article finds that Oblivia's muteness demonstrates the interlocking discourses of racism, ableism, and anthropocentrism at work in Western colonialism. As a result, the character's muteness indicates how the category of ‘animal’ has been discursively employed to justify the dual exclusion of Indigenous and disabled people from the category of the human. Oblivia’s embrace of the black swans and her subsequent refusal to communicate in ways that are normatively acceptable to hearing people is an important reminder for readers to orient themselves ethically to others whose embodiments, minds, and ways of life may be (radically) different from their own.'(Publication abstract)

'The Indigenous Australian author Alexis Wright has developed a novelistic oeuvre that experiments with written forms of fiction, and paints an Aboriginal universe that does not need European epistemology to sustain itself. Rather, it questions western values, certainties, and convictions and problematizes the western way of seeing and doing in the island-continent. Her latest novel, The Swan Book, in manifesting its spiritual and mystical connections to the holistic universe known as the Dreamtime, foregrounds this epistemological turn, which is premised on the ontological relationship Aboriginal people have with “Country,” their traditional land. Alexis Wright’s fiction, which she herself has called an instance of “Aboriginal reality” or “Aboriginal realism,” as opposed to magic realism, is an epic tour de force that juxtaposes the Indigenous and European traditions in startling ways but also speaks across a cultural divide – the discursive gap between colonized and colonizer, belonging and non-belonging, assimilation and sovereignty – which this essay will address.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper investigates the potential of Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book to revitalise readers’ apprehension of place, and human entanglements with the non-human world. It ponders over how Wright calls readers to question ways of being and knowing. Finally, the paper explores how The Swan Book’s complexity and thus its resistance to readers’ perception demands an ethics of reading Indigenous literature.' (Publication abstract)