AustLit

'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)