Kylie Crane | University of Rostock (original) (raw)

Books by Kylie Crane

Plastic and concrete are two of the most ubiquitous materials of the modern age. This open access... more Plastic and concrete are two of the most ubiquitous materials of the modern age. This open access book traces inventions, inventories and interventions of these materials as they pervade our day-to-day lives across various forms.

By proposing we think of the ways materials configure 'future artefacts', and by recognizing the various ways in which materials shape our encounters with the world, the book explores the productive tensions implicit in, and between, concrete and plastic. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including novels, essays, travel and nature writings, films, poems, souvenirs, advertisements, policy documents, environmental art, wrapping,and (popular) science writing, the book attends to all kinds of cultural artefacts to trace imaginative entanglements with disparate others in the Anthropocene.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com Open access was funded by The University of Rostock.

The Minor on the Move: Doing Cosmopolitanisms, 2021

This volume /Visualising Australia: Images, Icons, Imaginations/ comprises a collection of ten pa... more This volume /Visualising Australia: Images, Icons, Imaginations/ comprises a collection of ten papers given at the thirteenth conference of the Association for Australian Studies at the University of Stuttgart in September 2012, which are supplemented by a comprehensive introduction to Visual Culture Studies and Australian Visualities. The contributions probe and critique visual images that have become lodged in cultural memory as powerful vehicles of national identity. Paintings, photographs, mixed media, maps, documentaries, advertisements, cartoons and literary images form the subject matter. Together, the contributions offer historical depth, a breadth of disciplinary backgrounds and draw on Australian and international perspectives. This volume thus makes a timely contribution to Visual Culture Studies and Australian Studies alike.
Introduction (Renate Brosch, Kylie Crane); articles by Bill Ashcroft, Corinna Erckenbrecht & Anna Haebich, Elizabeth Rechniewski & Matthew Graves, Mitchell Rolls, Russ West-Pavlov, Laura White, Farida Fozdar, Tess Meyer, Katrina Schlunke and Paul Carter.

The concept of "wilderness" as a foundational idea for environmentalist thought and writing has b... more The concept of "wilderness" as a foundational idea for environmentalist thought and writing has become the subject of vigorous debates over the last two decades. This book offers a carefully articulated taxonomy of the forms that wilderness writing has taken in recent Australian and Canadian literature, expanding on this work in unusual ways by re-emphasizing both country's origins as colonies. In its combination of ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and cultural geography, Crane makes an important and original contribution to current ecocritical research.

Articles & Essays by Kylie Crane

Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture, 2023

In lieu of a “patch,” then, what images and symbols can be mobilized to “move the masses” to respond to this phenomenon? Images of two kinds of maritime birds have emerged: the Layson albatross, lying prostate with plastic (Chris Jordan’s “Midway Islands” series, Susan Middleton and David Liittschwager’s Archipelago volume), and the rubber duck, rendered both homely and unheimlich in several books (Slow Death by Rubber Duck by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn).

Drawing on theories of entanglement, archipelagoes, and toxicity, this article stresses the relational as a crucial component of political and ethical critique. The “moving” of the subtitle thus not only references the mobility of the material itself, but also the different aesthetic measures employed to effect responses and responsibilities.

[The chapter is based on a talk held in 2016.]

Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik , 2022

Science fiction (SF), through its various generic conventions, provides a stage for exploring man... more Science fiction (SF), through its various generic conventions, provides a stage for exploring many dimensions of the Anthropocene: It enables challenges to time, to species, to causalities, to space-time coherences, and also to singularity. Tade Thompson's-Wormwood trilogy engages several non-linear metaphors in engendering a nonhuman other, most specifically internet networks and fungi becoming. The alien sentience rendered in the trilogy offers an-amorphous and yet simultaneously very concrete-other against which humans must rally, themselves at the brink of the threat of extinction. Wormwood's xenosphere-an atmosphere permeated with ›xenoforms‹, a kind of alien fungi which can interact with humansconstitutes only one of the many ways in which this SF world challenges the modes with which we organise our knowledges of our world.

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 2020

I take the tomato as a case study of, and for, culinary cultural studies, or Food and Cultural St... more I take the tomato as a case study of, and for, culinary cultural studies, or Food and Cultural Studies. The quotidian practices of tomato consumption are placed firmly within practices of eating, including positions of privilege, affordances, as well as the practices of procuring and preparing food. I grapple with my own engagements in these practices, for this is not a dis-embodied speculation, but an articulation of the entanglements and contradictions that shape my day-to-day life. Further, and farther, tomatoes are a key ingredient in any number of cuisines throughout the world. It is a worldly, if not global, food source.

Open Library of Humanities, 2019

Literary criticism, particularly ecocriticism, occupies an uneasy position with regard to activis... more Literary criticism, particularly ecocriticism, occupies an uneasy position with regard to activism: reading books (or plays, or poems) seems like a rather leisurely activity to be undertaking if our environment—our planet—is in crisis. And yet, critiquing the narratives that structure worlds and discourses is key to the activities of the (literary) critic in this time of crisis. If this crisis manifests as a ‘crisis of imagination’ (e.g. Ghosh), I argue that this not so much a crisis of the absence of texts that address the environmental disaster, but rather a failure to comprehend the presences of the Anthropocene in the present. To interpret (literary) texts in this framework must entail acknowledging and scrutinising the extent of the incapacity of the privileged reader to comprehend the crisis as presence and present rather than spatially or temporally remote. The readings of the novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright (Australia) trace the uneven presences of Anthropocenes in the present by way of bringing future worlds (The Swan Book) to the contemporary (Carpentaria). In both novels, protagonists must forge survival amongst ruins of the present and future: the depicted worlds, in particular the representations of the disenfranchisement of indigenous inhabitants of the far north of the Australian continent, emerge as a critique of the intersections of capitalist and colonial projects that define modernity and its impact on the global climate.

The Cambridge History of Travel Writing. Nandini Das & Tim Youngs (ed), 2019

In: Ehland, Christoph, Ilka Mindt & Merle Tönnies. Anglistentag 2015 Paderborn: Proceedings. Trie... more In: Ehland, Christoph, Ilka Mindt & Merle Tönnies. Anglistentag 2015 Paderborn: Proceedings. Trier: WVT, 2016. 207-217.

This contribution examines the interconnection between the ‘wild’ and ‘wilderness’ in two recent ... more This contribution examines the interconnection between the ‘wild’ and ‘wilderness’ in two recent non-fiction books. In the light of recent work done in environmental philosophy and ecocriticism, I disentangle the terms, suggesting that ‘wilderness’ represents a problematic spatial manifestation, whereas the ‘wild’ continues to act as a place-holder for an (essentialist) idea of nature, even as it continues to be troubled by notions of purity inherent in wilderness discourses. It is the double function of the genres ‘nature writing’ and ‘travel writing’ ascribed to Jay Griffiths’ Wild and Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places that necessarily spatializes (the) wild into something that approximates wilderness. In order to find wild at home in the UK, a different interpretative framework is required, one that acknowledges the ongoing influence of wilderness thought but at the same time foregrounds a different, affective, aesthetics. (forthcoming)

This essay provides an introduction to issues and approaches of post-colonial environmentalism an... more This essay provides an introduction to issues and approaches of post-colonial environmentalism and how these might be broached in secondary or tertiary classrooms. The three themes of waste, wilderness and whales take up familiar issues (pollution, space and animals) to engage theoretical and cultur-al texts (specifically literature and film). Practices of position-taking are for-grounded to stress the role of teacher and students alike within matricies of (post)colonial power and with respect to human-nonhuman entanglements. By engendering an atmosphere of discussion and of self-reflective critique, anal-yses of stories from across the globe are brought in conversation with ‘home’, stressing the mediating role of both teacher and students in a globalized and globalizing world of multiple agencies. (forthcoming)

In: Visualising Australia: Images, Icons, Imaginations. Renate Brosch and Kylie Crane (eds). Trier: WVT, 2014.

/Teaching Environments/ ed. Roman Bartosch & Sieglinde Grimm, Feb 2014

ARIEL (A Review of International English Literature) Vol 44.4 , Oct 2013

Located just off the North Walpole Road, the Swarbrick Wilderness Discovery Site can be seen as a... more Located just off the North Walpole Road, the Swarbrick Wilderness Discovery Site can be seen as a node of several different historical trajectories which are-to different extents-documented in the artworks which frame, or decorate, the site. My account draws on my own biography and probes the investments I have in my various post-settler entanglements with the area. I critique, in particular, the idea of "wilderness" as one formative to post-settler narrations and myths at the same time that it places indigenous practices of belonging under erasure. For, most recently, Swarbrick stood metonymically for the campaign to preserve "old growth forests," culminating at the end of the 1990s, and yet it is and has been also a site of logging, agriculture, Noongar belonging, that is, of pre-colonial and settler colonial spatial practices. In this article, I explore the different ways the Swarbrick Wilderness Discovery site positions itself and, critically, its visitor within frameworks provided by ecocritical and environmental discourse and post-settler theories.

Journal of Ecocriticism, Feb 2014

Bringing together the visual, the literary and the material, 'pastoral' is a complex concept. It ... more Bringing together the visual, the literary and the material, 'pastoral' is a complex concept. It has idyllic and labour--intensive connotations, alludes to the religious and the agricultural, and has specific generic traditions as well as often less clearly articulated quotidian uses. The following analyses of Andrew McGahan's The White Earth and J.M. Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K trace the transposition of pastoral into the Australian and South African contexts respectively, showing the ways in which various interpretations and uses of the pastoral inform and are informed by the politics of the novels. In particular, attention is paid to the paradigm of visuality, of seeing and of being seen, of landscape and landscaping, and of the power positions entailed by these practices. Pastoral, anti--pastoral, post--pastoral; as legal term, landscape tradition, land--use practice: The metaphor of vellum picks up on all of these characteristics as a leitmotif for reading postcolonial pastoral as deference to as well as difference from pastoral traditions.

Kvr-re CnnNB lntroduction ultR Lett;g's The Hunter is not an easy read. The problern is not so mu... more Kvr-re CnnNB lntroduction ultR Lett;g's The Hunter is not an easy read. The problern is not so much the prose style as the way it asks difficult questions, and its difficult protagonist. The novel, frrst published in 1999, is set in Tasmania, in a time that the contemporary reader might readily identify as 'now'. Its main protagonist, also the novel's only focalizer, is an elusive man who calls himself "Martin David, Naturalist,"r with whom it is difficult to identi$r, not least because he is in no way a naturalist: "Martin David, Naturalist" is in fact the hvnter of the r.rovel's title. It is, however, through this awkward characler that the novel is able to ask difficult questions about extinction and related ethical issues: For M, as "Martin David, Naturalist" is usually referred to,2 is hunting the Ta^smanian (or Tassie) tiger. The intriguing aspect that makes such questions possible is that the last known specimen of Thykrcinus cynoc'ephalus died in captivity in 1936. Further, the animal functions as a symbol for a number of things, mostly linked with Tasmanian culture: in my analysis of The Hunter, I will read the thylacine (another name fbr this indigenous animal) as a symbol for a colonial past and for changing beliefs in nature.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com Open access was funded by The University of Rostock.

The Minor on the Move: Doing Cosmopolitanisms, 2021

Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture, 2023

[The chapter is based on a talk held in 2016.]

Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik , 2022

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, 2020

Open Library of Humanities, 2019

The Cambridge History of Travel Writing. Nandini Das & Tim Youngs (ed), 2019

In: Visualising Australia: Images, Icons, Imaginations. Renate Brosch and Kylie Crane (eds). Trier: WVT, 2014.

/Teaching Environments/ ed. Roman Bartosch & Sieglinde Grimm, Feb 2014

ARIEL (A Review of International English Literature) Vol 44.4 , Oct 2013

Journal of Ecocriticism, Feb 2014

The ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is a misnomer. It suggests an easily visualisable mass of plast... more The ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is a misnomer. It suggests an easily visualisable mass of plastic, island-like and clearly delineable, floating atop the Pacific Ocean. The reality is that the masses of plastic move not singularly as a mass, nor are they necessarily clearly visible. The plastic moves, certainly: It shifts, floats and sinks. It entangles and mangles. And it degrades, exuding lethal toxins into and through the oceans. The ‘Plastic Pacific’ is more a shifting accretion of material than a static accumulation of objects.

In lieu of a ‘patch’, then, what images and symbols can be mobilised to ‘move the masses’ to respond to this phenomenon? In particular, images of two kinds of maritime birds have emerged: albatrosses and ducks. Specifically, the images of the Layson albatross, laying prostate with plastic (made famous, for instance, by Chris Jordan’s “Midway Islands” series, or in Susan Middleton and David Liittschwager’s Archipelago volume) and the rubber duck, rendered both homely and unheimlich in several books (Slow Death by Rubber Duck by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie and Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn, to cite two examples).

Drawing on theories of entanglement, archipelagoes and risk/toxicity, ‘Plastic Pacific’ stresses the material of material cultures to stress the relational as a crucial component of political and ethical critique. The ‘moving’ of the subtitle thus not only references the mobility of the material itself, but also the different aesthetic measures employed to effect responses and responsibilities.

Alternative Modernities & Plastic Inventories ... will be published in 2016

This talk will address the phenomenon of, and paths taken by, the transposition of an idea—wilder... more This talk will address the phenomenon of, and paths taken by, the transposition of an idea—wilderness—that has been articulated in marginal settings back to the ‘centre’ (here, following Anglophone articulations of the postcolonial, the UK). The formulation of environmental thought in the US has been critiqued for its US-centricity, in particular formulations of ideas of nature that draw strongly on values of purity and size: wilderness. The idea of wilderness, and its currency in policy, has resulted in specific practices in various settings throughout the world with varying effects. Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, for example, gives a fictionalised account of the disastrous effects that policies of natural purity, espoused through wilderness-influenced thought, can have in the Sundarban setting. In this talk, I turn to travel narratives for their engagement with the cognate term ‘wild’, in particular Jay Griffiths’ Wild and Robert Mcfarlane’s The Wild Places, as examples of British writing that grapple with the troubling heritage of wilderness. I will trace the interferences implicit in transpositions of ideas of wilderness, the complicity of placed notions of ‘wild’ with ideas of wilderness—both in the UK and its projection elsewhere—and the aesthetic devices employed in the texts to evoke the wild. I read such texts through a framework influenced by ecocriticism that stresses that how we write and talk of the environment might engender particular responses to our environment.

Of the many films that could be taught in an EFL Critical Animal Studies seminar, Babe is perhaps... more Of the many films that could be taught in an EFL Critical Animal Studies seminar, Babe is perhaps not most people’s first choice. It is a feel-good children’s film, following a rather simple plot, with cutesy aesthetics, not a confrontational tome created to challenge attitudes. However, the film provides a ‘safe ground’ for discussion, particularly important at the outset of a seminar that looks to cross more emotionally charged territory (eating habits, factory farms, animal experimentation, animal abuse). References to other children’s films such as Free Willy and Finding Nemo will be made to elucidate moments of affect, focusing on the aesthetic devices employed by film makers to produce emotional responses to the issues explored. In this paper, I will draw on my experiences teaching this film to demonstrate ways of fostering critique of human-nonhuman relationships.

This paper will explore the particular aesthetics of urban exploration (UE). The number of recent... more This paper will explore the particular aesthetics of urban exploration (UE). The number of recent photography books with UE photographs suggests the art form is both popular and marketable. Further, the presence of almost half a million photos with this tag on flickr.com attests to its widespread existence, despite the often questionable legal state of the activities which bring forth these photos. Such photos are sometimes highly aestheticised as a result of intensive ‘photoshopping’. The use of colour, in particular, works both to defamiliarise the objects and sites photographed and, at the same time, to aestheticise, even anaesthetise, them. Industrial sites, abandoned buildings and cities (e.g. Detroit) as well as underground networks figure prominently; the interest in decay, waste and the unknown alludes to discourses of the abject and the sublime. Engagements with junk and junk landscapes, I will argue, have the potential to challenge and change our responses to landscapes in general.
The UE ethos of ‘take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints’ provides a productive dialogue with ecocritical thought, repeating verbatim a well-known slogan. Indeed, just as weeds are said to be plants in the ‘wrong place’, it is possible to consider junk and refuse similarly, in the ways they resist categorisation into often dualistically conceptualised systems of good and bad, pretty and ugly. In order to trace this idea, I will focus on a number of photographs, as well as referencing other cultural texts (novels, blogs, films).

Springer eBooks, Dec 31, 2022

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment focuses on new research in the Environmental Humanitie... more Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment focuses on new research in the Environmental Humanities, particularly work with a rhetorical or literary dimension. Books in this series seek to explore how ideas of nature and environmental concerns are expressed in different cultural contexts and at different historical moments. They investigate how cultural assumptions and practices as well as social structures and institutions shape conceptions of nature, the natural, species boundaries, uses of plants, animals and natural resources, the human body in its environmental dimensions, environmental health and illness, and relations between nature and technology. In turn, the series aims to make visible how concepts of nature and forms of environmentalist thought and representation arise from the confluence of a community's ecological and social conditions with its cultural assumptions, perceptions, and institutions. Such assumptions and institutions help to make some environmental crises visible and conceal others, confer social and cultural significance on certain ecological changes and risk scenarios, and shape possible responses to them. Across a wide range of historical moments and cultural communities, the verbal, visual, and performing arts have helped to give expression to such concerns, but cultural assumptions also underlie legal, medical, religious, technological, and media-based engagements with environmental issues. Books in this series will analyze how literatures and cultures of nature form and dissolve; how cultures map nature, literally and metaphorically; how cultures of nature rooted in particular places develop dimensions beyond that place (e.g., in the virtual realm); and what practical differences such literatures and cultures make for human uses of the environment and for historical reshapings of nature. The core of the series not only lies in literary and cultural studies, but it also embraces work that reaches out from that core to establish connections to related research in art history, anthropology, communication, history, philosophy, environmental psychology, media studies, and cultural geography. A great deal of work in the Environmental Humanities to date has focused on the United States and Britain and on the last two centuries. Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment not only seeks to build on new research in these areas, but also and in particular aims to make visible projects that address the relationship between culture and environmentalism from a comparative perspective, or that engage with regions, cultures, or historical moments beyond the modern period in Britain and the United States. The series also includes work that, reaching beyond national and majority cultures, focuses on emergent cultures, subcultures, and minority cultures in their engagements with environmental issues. In some cases, such work was originally written in a language other than English and subsequently translated for publication in the series, so as to encourage multiple perspectives and intercultural dialog on environmental issues and their representation.

Anglistik, 2020

Most of the time, when I cook and when I eat, there it is: tomato. I hold it, I cut it, I open up... more Most of the time, when I cook and when I eat, there it is: tomato. I hold it, I cut it, I open up cans of it, I shake it out of bottles; I slice it, spear it, scoop it, suck up its juice, swallow down its flavours. I reckon I probably eat tomatoes every single day: It is in the salads, soups, sauces, and sandwiches that comprise the cornerstones of my diet. 1 The everydayness of the tomato is, for me, given. Tomato is also very strange: a fruit-that is, a berry-eaten as vegetable; 2 a selfpollinating plant cultivated over decades of human interaction, or desire; 3 a plant transplanted from the Americas and yet (still, today) entangled in (neo-)imperial relations of slavery. When I eat tomato, I am embodying all these relations in my practices of the everyday. Thinking tomato in this way also entails thinking about tomato as ingredient. The term 'ingredient' denotes foods or substances that are combined to make a particular dish, or is used to mean a component or part of something. As a substance or food that can be combined, tomato thus circumvents issues of cultural appropriation: Whilst particular dishes might be subject to appropriation, as such it is the practicesembodied doings-that are appropriated, rather than 'raw' substances. Further, coming to terms with tomato as a component or part of something-the second meaning of ingredient-means grappling with tomato through its various historical, social, material, agricultural, imperial, and environmental relations. As Wiebke Beushausen et al. succinctly note, "[f]ood is at once a material good and a means of symbolic representation" (2014, 11). The tomato, in the form we know it today, is the product of over 500 years of domestication. As Adam Wickberg observes, following Alfred W. Crosby, "it is hard 1 I am not alone in my consumption of tomatoes-consumption of tomatoes in Germany, where I live and write this piece, is currently at just over 27 kg/person/annum, with an increase of around 5 kg/person/annum over the last 10 years (statista.de). 2 As Eugene N. Anderson points out, they are "berries to the botanist but not to the diner" (2005, 117). Botanically, tomatoes should be with the pears, pineapples, and pomegranates, not with the potatoes, pumpkins, and parsnips. Whilst a law case in the US in 1893 ruled that they should be considered vegetables, this was a tariff concern and not a biological breakthrough (CDPH 2007, 3). 3 This has not always been the case, as the designation "devil's fruit" would suggest. Perhaps due to people eating the stems or leaves (which are often considered slightly toxic due to presences of tomatine and solanine [but see McGee 2009]), tomatoes took a while to enter the diets of the West (Smith 2001, x; and below). The tomato's various names attest to various fascinations. In South Tyrol and Austria, Paradeiser or Paradiesapfel: "Paradise" or "apple of paradise;" and in France, pomme d'amour, "the apple of love." Assumptions and attributionsthe meanings carried by Solanum lycopersicum are many, and often contradictory.

To the Last Drop - Affective Economies of Extraction and Sentimentality

Nuclear projects are extractive. This is true for the processes that come before detonations, lik... more Nuclear projects are extractive. This is true for the processes that come before detonations, like mining, and, as I will argue in this contribution, those processes that extend into the long-term future. Nuclear detonations, either slow and enduring (as in power plants) or sudden and explosive (as in bombs), extract from both the past and the future, and yet cushion the present, even as material remnants of these processes accumulate all around us. 1 On the topic of harnessing nuclear energy, Rebecca Solnit suggests that [t]here is something wondrous about the fact that humans have managed to make stars, and something horrible about the fact that they, or we, went to the trouble of making stars for no more interesting reason that obliterating other human beings, and the places around them. (43) 1 That the latter use (as a source of energy) came after the first (the bomb) is a function of applicable research funding-the military had the resources-as much, perhaps, as anything else (cf. e.g., Flisfeder or Solnit 108-144). The accumulations, as will become clear, are both the kind that will require storage (cf. e.g., Ialenti) or that are stored in the body (cf. Hecht or Williams).

Springer eBooks, 2023

The “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”is a misnomer. It suggests an easily visualizable mass of plasti... more The “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”is a misnomer. It suggests an easily visualizable mass of plastic, clearly defined and floating atop the Pacific Ocean. The reality is that the masses of plastic move not singularly as a mass, nor are they necessarily clearly visible. The plastic moves, certainly; it shifts, floats, and sinks. It entangles and mangles. And it degrades, exuding lethal toxins into and through the oceans. The “Plastic Pacific” is more a shifting accretion of material than a static accumulation of objects. In lieu of a “patch,” then, what images and symbols can be mobilized to “move the masses” to respond to this phenomenon? Images of two kinds of maritime birds have emerged: the Layson albatross, lying prostate with plastic (Chris Jordan’s “Midway Islands” series, Susan Middleton and David Liittschwager’s Archipelago volume), and the rubber duck, rendered both homely and unheimlich in several books (Slow Death by Rubber Duck by Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn). Drawing on theories of entanglement, archipelagoes, and toxicity, this article stresses the relational as a crucial component of political and ethical critique. The “moving” of the subtitle thus not only references the mobility of the material itself, but also the different aesthetic measures employed to effect responses and responsibilities. [The chapter is based on a talk held in 2016.]

Spatial Practices, Jan 2, 2016

Comparative Critical Studies

Thinking fungi as a way of considering randomness gives rise, in particular, to thinking about ca... more Thinking fungi as a way of considering randomness gives rise, in particular, to thinking about categorization, comparison, as well as creating (more-than-human) communities through strange and unexpected commonalities. These ideas inform comparative literature more broadly, along with the desire to identify and understand culturally codified motifs – that is, meanings as they gather around particular images and generate certain ideas of being in the world. By bringing fungi to the table, this contribution considers agency and ruin with contemporary narrativized deliberations on all kinds of fungi matter(s). Textually, it examines memoirs, (new) nature writing, as well as cultural studies work on fungi; theoretically, it draws on etymology and systems of classification more broadly, impulses from new materialism, as well as STS-informed deliberations on knowledge generation, classification, and circulation.

Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik

Science fiction (SF), through its various generic conventions, provides a stage for exploring man... more Science fiction (SF), through its various generic conventions, provides a stage for exploring many dimensions of the Anthropocene: It enables challenges to time, to species, to causalities, to space-time coherences, and also to singularity. Tade Thompson’s-Wormwood trilogy engages several non-linear metaphors in engendering a nonhuman other, most specifically internet networks and fungi becoming. The alien sentience rendered in the trilogy offers an – amorphous and yet simultaneously very concrete – other against which humans must rally, themselves at the brink of the threat of extinction. Wormwood’s xenosphere – an atmosphere permeated with ›xenoforms‹, a kind of alien fungi which can interact with humans – constitutes only one of the many ways in which this SF world challenges the modes with which we organise our knowledges of our world.

Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction, 2019

The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, 2019

Myths of Wilderness in Contemporary Narratives, 2012

Issues of environmental concern are deeply related to issues of environmental perception and repr... more Issues of environmental concern are deeply related to issues of environmental perception and representation. This becomes particularly astute in conjunction with texts with characteristics of the “utilizing the wilderness” type, as also explored in the previous chapter. In this chapter, I turn my attention to Julia Leigh’s The Hunter. This novel engages with myths of wilderness by also positing the evasive figure of the thylacine/Tasmanian Tiger as a metaphor for wilderness.1 Issues of survival, extinction, feminization, and other- ing are played out through this figure, with specific effects for the understanding of wilderness that informs the nature of the novel. In the scope of this project, The Hunter is read not only in terms of the utilizing the wilderness type—foregrounding issues of logging and conservation—but can also be productively read in terms of the “into the wilderness” type considering the figure of the hunter, and as “post-wilderness” writing given the ethical concerns the text explicitly and implicitly raises.

English Topographies in Literature and Culture, 2016

Local Natures, Global Responsibilities, 2010

Open Library of Humanities, 2019

This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Open Library of Humanitie... more This article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of Open Library of Humanities, which is a journal published by the Open Library of Humanities.

Myths of Wilderness in Contemporary Narratives, 2012

In Tim Winton’s novel Dirt Music, almost-indigenous wanderer Axle burns Robinsonade loner Luther ... more In Tim Winton’s novel Dirt Music, almost-indigenous wanderer Axle burns Robinsonade loner Luther Fox’s maps and says to him: “Go on the country, … [n]ot on the map” (312). This scene is pivotal in my reading of the novel in that it foregrounds the slippages and discrepancies between real and imagined landscapes. It alludes to the key paradox of wilderness, constructed in the novel as an imagined geography, a site of projection, an island off the northwest coast of Australia.

ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2013

Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2006

Myths of Wilderness in Contemporary Narratives, 2012

The editors of EJES are issuing calls for papers for issues of the journal to be published in 202... more The editors of EJES are issuing calls for papers for issues of the journal to be published in 2024. Potential contributors are reminded that EJES operates a two-stage review process. The first is based on the submission of detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) and results in invitations to submit full essays from which a final selection is then made. The deadline for essay proposals for this volume is 30 November 2022, with delivery of completed essays in the spring of 2023, and publication in Volume 28 (2024). Procedure EJES operates a two-stage review process.