Laura Wright | Western Carolina University (original) (raw)
Videos by Laura Wright
I interview Edwidge Danticat for Western Carolina University's annual Spring Literature Festival ... more I interview Edwidge Danticat for Western Carolina University's annual Spring Literature Festival (2021).
11 views
Books by Laura Wright
The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee, 2023
In nearly all of J.M. Coetzee’s work, sex and sexuality are treated as problematic, and when I te... more In nearly all of J.M. Coetzee’s work, sex and sexuality are treated as problematic, and when I teach his novels, my students often make me aware of the “ick” factor that underscores sexual encounters in his fiction. Aside from various overt rapes -- Jacobus’s of a Bushman girl who he describes “a rag you wipe yourself on and throw away. She is completely disposable. [. . .] She can kick and scream but she knows she is lost” in his first novel Dusklands (1974), Hendrik’s rape of Magda in In the Heart of the Country (1977), and that most critically-discussed and (African National Congress condemned) rape of Lucy Lurie in Disgrace (1999) – Coetzee’s fiction also includes scenes that are disturbing in their coercive ambiguity; as my students suggest, such instances are “rapey,” “rapish,” or “rapesque.” For example, in Disgrace, David Lurie’s sexual encounter with his student Melanie, via his interpretation, is “not quite” rape “but undesired nonetheless, undesired to the core” ; the Magistrate engages in a masturbatory bathing ritual cantered around washing the body of a barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) ; a woman fellates an unwilling Michael K in Life & Times of Michael K (1983) ; and in Foe (1986), Cruso ignores Susan Barton’s rebuff and has sex with her, a transgression for which she excuses him, saying, “he has not known a woman for 15 years, why should he not have his desire?” At the start of Disgrace, we learn that David Lurie has “solved the problem of sex” via weekly visits to the prostitute Soraya. The idea that sex constitutes a “problem” is a theme that is writ large across Coetzee’s opus. Sex is a problem for the very reason that it requires a reciprocity that is always impossible in the various contexts in which Coetzee situates his works – contexts that are acutely and self-consciously informed by their socio-cultural imbrication in colonial and white supremacist politics. In this piece, I want to consider how the problem of sex manifests in two of Coetzee’s earlier works, Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Foe (1988). Via narratives that are infused with scenes of disturbing, violent, and/problematic sex, both works explore ambivalent gendered performative spaces that challenge Western master narratives of heteronormative literary production and apartheid’s specific legacy of white supremacy.
Ecocriticism and Appalachian studies continue to grow and thrive in academia, as they expand on t... more Ecocriticism and Appalachian studies continue to grow and thrive in academia, as they expand on their foundational works to move in new and exciting directions. When researching these areas separately, there is a wealth of information. However, when researching Appalachian ecocriticism specifically, the lack of consolidated scholarship is apparent. With Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place, editors Jessica Cory and Laura Wright have created the only book-length scholarly collection of Appalachian ecocriticism.
Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place is a collection of scholarly essays that engage environmental and ecocritical theories and Appalachian literature and film. These essays, many from well-established Appalachian studies and southern studies scholars and ecocritics, engage with a variety of ecocritical methodologies, including ecofeminism, ecospiritualism, queer ecocriticism, and materialist ecocriticism, to name a few.
Adding Appalachian voices to the larger ecocritical discourse is vital not only for the sake of increased diversity but also to allow those unfamiliar with the region and its works to better understand the Appalachian region in a critical and authentic way. Including Appalachia in the larger ecocritical community allows for the study of how the region, its issues, and its texts intersect with a variety of communities, thus allowing boundless possibilities for learning and analysis.
THE EDINBURGH COMPANION TO VEGAN LITERARY STUDIES, 2022
Vegan literary studies has been crystallised over the past few years as a dynamic new specialism,... more Vegan literary studies has been crystallised over the past few years as a dynamic new specialism, with a transhistorical and transnational scope that both nuances and expands literary history and provides new tools and paradigms through which to approach literary analysis. Vegan studies has emerged alongside the ‘animal turn’ in the humanities. However, while veganism is often considered as a facet of animal studies, broadly conceived, it is also a distinct entity, an ethical delineator that for many scholars marks a complicated boundary between theoretical pursuit and lived experience.
This collection of 25 essays maps and engages with that which might be termed the 'vegan turn' in literary theoretical analysis via essays that explore literature from across a range of historical periods, cultures and textual forms. It provides thematic explorations (such as veganism and race and veganism and gender) and covers a wide range of genres (from the philosophical essay to speculative fiction, and from poetry to the graphic novel, to name a few). The volume also provides an extensive annotated bibliography summarising existing work within the emergent field of vegan studies.
The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies, 2021
Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism, 2019
This inescapably controversial study envisions, defines, and theorizes an area that Laura Wright ... more This inescapably controversial study envisions, defines, and theorizes an area
that Laura Wright calls vegan studies. We have an abundance of texts on vegans and veganism including works of advocacy, literary and popular fiction, film and television, and cookbooks, yet until now, there has been no study that examines the social and cultural discourses shaping our perceptions of veganism as an identity category and social practice.
Ranging widely across contemporary American society and culture, Wright unpacks the loaded category of vegan identity. She examines the mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights to (or omitting animal rights from) veganism. Her specific focus is on the construction and depiction of the vegan body—both male and female—as a contested site manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and new media. At the same time, Wright looks at critical animal studies, human-animal studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism as theoretical frameworks that inform vegan studies (even as they differ from it).
The vegan body, says Wright, threatens the status quo in terms of what we eat, wear, and purchase—and also in how vegans choose not to participate in many aspects of the mechanisms undergirding mainstream culture. These threats are acutely felt in light of post-9/11 anxieties over American strength and virility. A discourse has emerged that seeks, among other things, to bully veganism out of existence as it is poised to alter the dominant cultural mindset or, conversely, to constitute the vegan body as an idealized paragon of health, beauty, and strength. What better serves veganism is exemplified by Wright’s study: openness, debate, inquiry, and analysis.
The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Pri... more The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work offers substantial pedagogical richness and challenges. Coetzee treats such themes as race, aging, gender, animal rights, power, violence, colonial history and accountability, the silent or silenced other, sympathy, and forgiveness in an allusive and detached prose that avoids obvious answers or easy ethical reassurance.
Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," identifies secondary materials, including multimedia and Internet resources, that will help instructors guide their students through the contextual and formal complexities of Coetzee's fiction. In part 2, "Approaches," essays discuss how to teach works that are sometimes suspicious of teachers and teaching. The essays aim to help instructors negotiate Coetzee's ironies and allegories in his treatment of human relationships in a changing South Africa and of the shifting connections between human beings and the biosphere.
To date, no text exists that focuses exclusively on the concept of postcolonial film as a framewo... more To date, no text exists that focuses exclusively on the concept of postcolonial film as a framework for identifying films produced within and outside of various formerly colonized nations, nor is there a scholarly text that addresses pedagogical issues about and frameworks for teaching such films. This book borrows from and respects various forms of categorization - intercultural, global, third, and accented - while simultaneously seeking to make manifest an alternate space of signification. What feels like a mainstream approach is pedagogically necessary in terms of access, both financial and physical, to the films discussed herein, given that this text proposes models for teaching these works at the university and secondary levels. The focus of this work is therefore twofold: to provide the methodology to read and teach postcolonial film, and also to provide analyses in which scholars and teachers can explore the ways that the films examined herein work to further and complicate our understanding of «postcolonial» as a fraught and evolving theoretical stance.
This study examines how postcolonial landscapes and environmental issues are represented in ficti... more This study examines how postcolonial landscapes and environmental issues are represented in fiction. Wright creates a provocative discourse in which the fields of postcolonial theory and ecocriticism are brought together.
Laura Wright explores the changes brought by colonialism and globalization as depicted in an array of international works of fiction in four thematically arranged chapters. She looks first at two traditional oral histories retold in modern novels, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (South Africa) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (Kenya), that deal with the potentially devastating effects of development, particularly through deforestation and the replacement of native flora with European varieties. Wright then uses J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (South Africa), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (India and Canada), and Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead (United States) to explore the use of animals as metaphors for subjugated groups of individuals. The third chapter deals with India’s water crisis via Arundhati Roy’s activism and her novel, The God of Small Things. Finally, Wright looks at three novels—Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (Nigeria), Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (New Zealand), and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (South Africa)—that depict women’s relationships to the land from which they have been dispossessed.
Throughout Wilderness into Civilized Shapes, Wright rearticulates questions about the role of the writer of fiction as environmental activist and spokesperson, the connections between animal ethics and environmental responsibility, and the potential perpetuation of a neocolonial framework founded on western commodification and resource-based imperialism.
Writing "Out of all the Camps": J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement is an interdisciplinar... more Writing "Out of all the Camps": J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement is an interdisciplinary examination--combining ethical, postcolonial, performance, gender-based, and environmental theory--of the ways that 2003 Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, primarily through his voicing of a female subject position and his presentation of a voiceless subjectivity, the animal, displaces both the narrative and authorial voice in his works of fiction. Coetzee's work remains outside of conventional notions of genre by virtue of the free indirect discourse that characterizes many of his third-person narrated texts that feature male protagonists (Life & Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, and Disgrace), various and differing first-person narrative accounts of the same story (Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country), the use of female narrators and female narrative personas (Age of Iron, The Lives of Animals), and unlocatable, ahistorical contexts (Waiting for the Barbarians). The work has broad academic appeal in the established fields of not only literary studies--postcolonial, contemporary, postmodern and environmental--but also in the realm of performance and gender studies. Because of its broad and interdisciplinary range, this text bridges a conspicuous gap in studies on Coetzee.
Talks by Laura Wright
Southern Review of Books, 2023
EcoLit Books, 2019
The catalyst was a 2010 editorial in the Chronicle of Higher Education, written by Harold Fromm, ... more The catalyst was a 2010 editorial in the Chronicle of Higher Education, written by Harold Fromm, in which he accused vegans of “grandstanding” and ridiculous idealism. Fromm’s a big name in ecocritical circles, so I was a bit taken aback by the piece. I decided to explore the way that veganism is perceived, specifically in the US, specifically post-9/11, so I wrote The Vegan Studies Project as a way of examining how veganism is depicted in the media, in literature, and in popular culture, and the way that that depiction has evolved over time. The original title of the book was “The Vegan Body Project” – I had a blog of the same name – as I had initially planned to look at the way vegan bodies are depicted and scrutinized. There is a chapter in the book that engages with the way that women’s bodies are pathologized when women are vegan, especially when they have children. But the project became so much bigger, and I decided that I’d treat the book as a kind of primer for what a field of academic study based on various analyses of veganism might look like. And then things just kind of took off in ways that I couldn’t have anticipated, including an invitation to be the keynote speaker at a conference on vegan theory at Oxford soon after the publication of the book
https://knowinganimals.libsyn.com/episode-167-vegan-studies-with-laura-wright, 2021
This episode of Knowing Animals features an interview with Professor Laura Wright. Laura is a Pro... more This episode of Knowing Animals features an interview with Professor Laura Wright. Laura is a Professor of English at Western Carolina University. She has authored research monographs of the work of J. M. Coetzee and on postcolonial studies, but is particularly well known in the animal studies world for championing “vegan studies”. Her book The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror was published in 2015 by the University of Georgia Press, and her edited collection Through A Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism was published in 2019 by the University of Nevada Press. In this episode, we discuss “Framing vegan studies: Vegetarianism, veganism, animal studies, ecofeminism”, which is the first chapter of The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies. The handbook, which Laura edited, was published earlier in 2021.
This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by the Australasian Animal Studies Association and the Animal Publics book series at Sydney University Press.
This podcast explores the field of vegan studies and Dr. Wright’s newest anthology, The Routledge... more This podcast explores the field of vegan studies and Dr. Wright’s newest anthology, The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies.
"The Other Animals", 2020
Podcast of a conversation hosted by Laurent Levy with Laura Wright and Chris Blazina on masculini... more Podcast of a conversation hosted by Laurent Levy with Laura Wright and Chris Blazina on masculinity and meat eating. Levy hosts "The Other Animals," which airs at 10:00 am every Friday on Philadelphia’s WWDB TALK 860.
TED-Ed, 2019
This is a collaborative lesson that I worked on with a team from TED
Literary Festival Virtual Talk | Jeff VanderMeer and Dr. Laura Wright
Vegan World Radio, 2020
Michael Battey interviews Laura Wright for KFPT's Vegan World Radio.
I interview Edwidge Danticat for Western Carolina University's annual Spring Literature Festival ... more I interview Edwidge Danticat for Western Carolina University's annual Spring Literature Festival (2021).
11 views
The Bloomsbury Handbook to J.M. Coetzee, 2023
In nearly all of J.M. Coetzee’s work, sex and sexuality are treated as problematic, and when I te... more In nearly all of J.M. Coetzee’s work, sex and sexuality are treated as problematic, and when I teach his novels, my students often make me aware of the “ick” factor that underscores sexual encounters in his fiction. Aside from various overt rapes -- Jacobus’s of a Bushman girl who he describes “a rag you wipe yourself on and throw away. She is completely disposable. [. . .] She can kick and scream but she knows she is lost” in his first novel Dusklands (1974), Hendrik’s rape of Magda in In the Heart of the Country (1977), and that most critically-discussed and (African National Congress condemned) rape of Lucy Lurie in Disgrace (1999) – Coetzee’s fiction also includes scenes that are disturbing in their coercive ambiguity; as my students suggest, such instances are “rapey,” “rapish,” or “rapesque.” For example, in Disgrace, David Lurie’s sexual encounter with his student Melanie, via his interpretation, is “not quite” rape “but undesired nonetheless, undesired to the core” ; the Magistrate engages in a masturbatory bathing ritual cantered around washing the body of a barbarian girl in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) ; a woman fellates an unwilling Michael K in Life & Times of Michael K (1983) ; and in Foe (1986), Cruso ignores Susan Barton’s rebuff and has sex with her, a transgression for which she excuses him, saying, “he has not known a woman for 15 years, why should he not have his desire?” At the start of Disgrace, we learn that David Lurie has “solved the problem of sex” via weekly visits to the prostitute Soraya. The idea that sex constitutes a “problem” is a theme that is writ large across Coetzee’s opus. Sex is a problem for the very reason that it requires a reciprocity that is always impossible in the various contexts in which Coetzee situates his works – contexts that are acutely and self-consciously informed by their socio-cultural imbrication in colonial and white supremacist politics. In this piece, I want to consider how the problem of sex manifests in two of Coetzee’s earlier works, Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Foe (1988). Via narratives that are infused with scenes of disturbing, violent, and/problematic sex, both works explore ambivalent gendered performative spaces that challenge Western master narratives of heteronormative literary production and apartheid’s specific legacy of white supremacy.
Ecocriticism and Appalachian studies continue to grow and thrive in academia, as they expand on t... more Ecocriticism and Appalachian studies continue to grow and thrive in academia, as they expand on their foundational works to move in new and exciting directions. When researching these areas separately, there is a wealth of information. However, when researching Appalachian ecocriticism specifically, the lack of consolidated scholarship is apparent. With Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place, editors Jessica Cory and Laura Wright have created the only book-length scholarly collection of Appalachian ecocriticism.
Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place is a collection of scholarly essays that engage environmental and ecocritical theories and Appalachian literature and film. These essays, many from well-established Appalachian studies and southern studies scholars and ecocritics, engage with a variety of ecocritical methodologies, including ecofeminism, ecospiritualism, queer ecocriticism, and materialist ecocriticism, to name a few.
Adding Appalachian voices to the larger ecocritical discourse is vital not only for the sake of increased diversity but also to allow those unfamiliar with the region and its works to better understand the Appalachian region in a critical and authentic way. Including Appalachia in the larger ecocritical community allows for the study of how the region, its issues, and its texts intersect with a variety of communities, thus allowing boundless possibilities for learning and analysis.
THE EDINBURGH COMPANION TO VEGAN LITERARY STUDIES, 2022
Vegan literary studies has been crystallised over the past few years as a dynamic new specialism,... more Vegan literary studies has been crystallised over the past few years as a dynamic new specialism, with a transhistorical and transnational scope that both nuances and expands literary history and provides new tools and paradigms through which to approach literary analysis. Vegan studies has emerged alongside the ‘animal turn’ in the humanities. However, while veganism is often considered as a facet of animal studies, broadly conceived, it is also a distinct entity, an ethical delineator that for many scholars marks a complicated boundary between theoretical pursuit and lived experience.
This collection of 25 essays maps and engages with that which might be termed the 'vegan turn' in literary theoretical analysis via essays that explore literature from across a range of historical periods, cultures and textual forms. It provides thematic explorations (such as veganism and race and veganism and gender) and covers a wide range of genres (from the philosophical essay to speculative fiction, and from poetry to the graphic novel, to name a few). The volume also provides an extensive annotated bibliography summarising existing work within the emergent field of vegan studies.
The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies, 2021
Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism, 2019
This inescapably controversial study envisions, defines, and theorizes an area that Laura Wright ... more This inescapably controversial study envisions, defines, and theorizes an area
that Laura Wright calls vegan studies. We have an abundance of texts on vegans and veganism including works of advocacy, literary and popular fiction, film and television, and cookbooks, yet until now, there has been no study that examines the social and cultural discourses shaping our perceptions of veganism as an identity category and social practice.
Ranging widely across contemporary American society and culture, Wright unpacks the loaded category of vegan identity. She examines the mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights to (or omitting animal rights from) veganism. Her specific focus is on the construction and depiction of the vegan body—both male and female—as a contested site manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and new media. At the same time, Wright looks at critical animal studies, human-animal studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism as theoretical frameworks that inform vegan studies (even as they differ from it).
The vegan body, says Wright, threatens the status quo in terms of what we eat, wear, and purchase—and also in how vegans choose not to participate in many aspects of the mechanisms undergirding mainstream culture. These threats are acutely felt in light of post-9/11 anxieties over American strength and virility. A discourse has emerged that seeks, among other things, to bully veganism out of existence as it is poised to alter the dominant cultural mindset or, conversely, to constitute the vegan body as an idealized paragon of health, beauty, and strength. What better serves veganism is exemplified by Wright’s study: openness, debate, inquiry, and analysis.
The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Pri... more The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work offers substantial pedagogical richness and challenges. Coetzee treats such themes as race, aging, gender, animal rights, power, violence, colonial history and accountability, the silent or silenced other, sympathy, and forgiveness in an allusive and detached prose that avoids obvious answers or easy ethical reassurance.
Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," identifies secondary materials, including multimedia and Internet resources, that will help instructors guide their students through the contextual and formal complexities of Coetzee's fiction. In part 2, "Approaches," essays discuss how to teach works that are sometimes suspicious of teachers and teaching. The essays aim to help instructors negotiate Coetzee's ironies and allegories in his treatment of human relationships in a changing South Africa and of the shifting connections between human beings and the biosphere.
To date, no text exists that focuses exclusively on the concept of postcolonial film as a framewo... more To date, no text exists that focuses exclusively on the concept of postcolonial film as a framework for identifying films produced within and outside of various formerly colonized nations, nor is there a scholarly text that addresses pedagogical issues about and frameworks for teaching such films. This book borrows from and respects various forms of categorization - intercultural, global, third, and accented - while simultaneously seeking to make manifest an alternate space of signification. What feels like a mainstream approach is pedagogically necessary in terms of access, both financial and physical, to the films discussed herein, given that this text proposes models for teaching these works at the university and secondary levels. The focus of this work is therefore twofold: to provide the methodology to read and teach postcolonial film, and also to provide analyses in which scholars and teachers can explore the ways that the films examined herein work to further and complicate our understanding of «postcolonial» as a fraught and evolving theoretical stance.
This study examines how postcolonial landscapes and environmental issues are represented in ficti... more This study examines how postcolonial landscapes and environmental issues are represented in fiction. Wright creates a provocative discourse in which the fields of postcolonial theory and ecocriticism are brought together.
Laura Wright explores the changes brought by colonialism and globalization as depicted in an array of international works of fiction in four thematically arranged chapters. She looks first at two traditional oral histories retold in modern novels, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (South Africa) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (Kenya), that deal with the potentially devastating effects of development, particularly through deforestation and the replacement of native flora with European varieties. Wright then uses J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (South Africa), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (India and Canada), and Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead (United States) to explore the use of animals as metaphors for subjugated groups of individuals. The third chapter deals with India’s water crisis via Arundhati Roy’s activism and her novel, The God of Small Things. Finally, Wright looks at three novels—Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (Nigeria), Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (New Zealand), and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (South Africa)—that depict women’s relationships to the land from which they have been dispossessed.
Throughout Wilderness into Civilized Shapes, Wright rearticulates questions about the role of the writer of fiction as environmental activist and spokesperson, the connections between animal ethics and environmental responsibility, and the potential perpetuation of a neocolonial framework founded on western commodification and resource-based imperialism.
Writing "Out of all the Camps": J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement is an interdisciplinar... more Writing "Out of all the Camps": J. M. Coetzee's Narratives of Displacement is an interdisciplinary examination--combining ethical, postcolonial, performance, gender-based, and environmental theory--of the ways that 2003 Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, primarily through his voicing of a female subject position and his presentation of a voiceless subjectivity, the animal, displaces both the narrative and authorial voice in his works of fiction. Coetzee's work remains outside of conventional notions of genre by virtue of the free indirect discourse that characterizes many of his third-person narrated texts that feature male protagonists (Life & Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, and Disgrace), various and differing first-person narrative accounts of the same story (Dusklands, In the Heart of the Country), the use of female narrators and female narrative personas (Age of Iron, The Lives of Animals), and unlocatable, ahistorical contexts (Waiting for the Barbarians). The work has broad academic appeal in the established fields of not only literary studies--postcolonial, contemporary, postmodern and environmental--but also in the realm of performance and gender studies. Because of its broad and interdisciplinary range, this text bridges a conspicuous gap in studies on Coetzee.
Southern Review of Books, 2023
EcoLit Books, 2019
The catalyst was a 2010 editorial in the Chronicle of Higher Education, written by Harold Fromm, ... more The catalyst was a 2010 editorial in the Chronicle of Higher Education, written by Harold Fromm, in which he accused vegans of “grandstanding” and ridiculous idealism. Fromm’s a big name in ecocritical circles, so I was a bit taken aback by the piece. I decided to explore the way that veganism is perceived, specifically in the US, specifically post-9/11, so I wrote The Vegan Studies Project as a way of examining how veganism is depicted in the media, in literature, and in popular culture, and the way that that depiction has evolved over time. The original title of the book was “The Vegan Body Project” – I had a blog of the same name – as I had initially planned to look at the way vegan bodies are depicted and scrutinized. There is a chapter in the book that engages with the way that women’s bodies are pathologized when women are vegan, especially when they have children. But the project became so much bigger, and I decided that I’d treat the book as a kind of primer for what a field of academic study based on various analyses of veganism might look like. And then things just kind of took off in ways that I couldn’t have anticipated, including an invitation to be the keynote speaker at a conference on vegan theory at Oxford soon after the publication of the book
https://knowinganimals.libsyn.com/episode-167-vegan-studies-with-laura-wright, 2021
This episode of Knowing Animals features an interview with Professor Laura Wright. Laura is a Pro... more This episode of Knowing Animals features an interview with Professor Laura Wright. Laura is a Professor of English at Western Carolina University. She has authored research monographs of the work of J. M. Coetzee and on postcolonial studies, but is particularly well known in the animal studies world for championing “vegan studies”. Her book The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror was published in 2015 by the University of Georgia Press, and her edited collection Through A Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism was published in 2019 by the University of Nevada Press. In this episode, we discuss “Framing vegan studies: Vegetarianism, veganism, animal studies, ecofeminism”, which is the first chapter of The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies. The handbook, which Laura edited, was published earlier in 2021.
This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by the Australasian Animal Studies Association and the Animal Publics book series at Sydney University Press.
This podcast explores the field of vegan studies and Dr. Wright’s newest anthology, The Routledge... more This podcast explores the field of vegan studies and Dr. Wright’s newest anthology, The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies.
"The Other Animals", 2020
Podcast of a conversation hosted by Laurent Levy with Laura Wright and Chris Blazina on masculini... more Podcast of a conversation hosted by Laurent Levy with Laura Wright and Chris Blazina on masculinity and meat eating. Levy hosts "The Other Animals," which airs at 10:00 am every Friday on Philadelphia’s WWDB TALK 860.
TED-Ed, 2019
This is a collaborative lesson that I worked on with a team from TED
Literary Festival Virtual Talk | Jeff VanderMeer and Dr. Laura Wright
Vegan World Radio, 2020
Michael Battey interviews Laura Wright for KFPT's Vegan World Radio.
The State of Things, 2019
In literature, film and popular culture, vegans have long been mocked and dismissed as naive, pri... more In literature, film and popular culture, vegans have long been mocked and dismissed as naive, privileged white women who allow emotion to guide their lifestyles. Food choices are indeed shaped by class and race, but using a “vegan lens” to analyze what people see and read may allow them to better recognize these “enmeshed oppressions,” according to Western Carolina University English Professor Laura Wright. She’s the editor of “Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism” (University of Nevada Press/2019).
Public lecture given at Appalachian State University on Thursday, October 10, 2019.
Western Carolina University Commencement Address, 12 May 2018
This is the audio of my appearance on NPR's WUNC program The State of Things during which Frank S... more This is the audio of my appearance on NPR's WUNC program The State of Things during which Frank Statio and I discuss The Vegan Studies Project.
This is the audio of my talk "Imagining Vegan Studies: English, Activism, and Animals" as well as... more This is the audio of my talk "Imagining Vegan Studies: English, Activism, and Animals" as well as Emelia Quinn's introduction and the Q&A session that followed.
This is the audio of a keynote address that I gave at Animal Politics: Justice, Power and the Sta... more This is the audio of a keynote address that I gave at Animal Politics: Justice, Power and the State for the Animal Politics: Justice, Power, and the State at the International School for Philosophy in the Netherlands. 11/11/16.
EAST -WEST CULTURAL PASSAGE, vol. 22, no. 1, 2022., 2023
This article provides an examination of the ways in which academic portraiture is deconstructed i... more This article provides an examination of the ways in which academic portraiture is deconstructed in three contemporary visual narratives whose academic protagonists are women of color, the Netflix series Dear White People (2017-2021), which is based on the 2014 film of the same name, both of which were created by Justin Simien; the 2021 Netflix series The Chair, created by Amanda Peet and Annie Julia Wyman; and the 2022 film Master directed by Mariama Diallo. In all three narratives, institutional portraits of white men are overdetermined as symbols of a foundational, historical, and omnipresent white supremacist misogyny that permeates higher education. Furthermore, these portraits serve to frame these narratives by conveying characters' positions as both products of and confrontational to an academic nostalgia for the past conveyed through the prevalence of portraits of wealthy white menand the white male gazewho have shaped and continues to shape and determine the white supremacist story of higher education in the United States.
The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies (Edited by Laura Wright and Emelia Quinn), 2022
This essay provides a vegan studies reading of three novels. South African author J. M. Coetzee’s... more This essay provides a vegan studies reading of three novels. South African author J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 Booker Prize-winning novel Life & Times of Michael K in many ways builds upon Kafka’s story of starvation and misunderstanding, but the narrative places the starving man, the auspiciously named Michael K, within a more fraught political context, a fictional South African civil war during which Michael’s starvation
is more clearly aligned with a desire to escape codification in a society in which apartheid demands strict adherence to racial and gender-based classification. Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s 1969 novel The Edible Woman depicts veganism as the precursor to insanity for Marian, the novel’s female protagonist, who stops eating animals at a moment when she realizes, in the context of her ensuing marriage, their subjectivity as aligned with her own. Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 Nervous Conditions, the first novel published in English by a Black Zimbabwean woman, tells the story of Tambu, a teenage Shona girl who witnesses the bulimia and subsequent nervous breakdown of her cousin Nyasha. Veganism is never explicit in the novel, but Nyasha’s “nervous condition” is very much a reaction to her unsuccessful attempts to resist “the Englishness” of her education and her meat-heavy diet, which alienates her from a more traditionally plant-based Shona diet. In Kafka’s and Coetzee’s work, men’s starvation is associated with passion, with art, and with the plight of being misunderstood and mistranslated. For the women of Atwood’s and Dangarembga’s novels, on the other hand, veganism is the first step towards mental illness and possibly death for women who feel they have no other option but to starve to avoid inscription within patriarchy. But while Coetzee’s and Dangarembga’s works also underscore these associations, their texts nevertheless complicate and challenge such gendered stereotypes, offering a postcolonial vegan unconscious that offers new and potentially empowering ways of thinking about the revolutionary potential of non-standard diets.
Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, 2022
This dialogue piece provides scholars of the rhetoric of health and medicine with a close examina... more This dialogue piece provides scholars of the rhetoric of health and medicine with a close examination of vegan and vegetarian diets/lifestyles through the perspective of several scholars, activists, and/or medical practitioners. Through these conversations, the authors illuminate many key areas of interest and future examination related to vegan and vegetarian diets through the lens of several subtopics including health impact, ethics, cultural influence on diet, gender, medical advice, emerging "meat" technologies, and societal rhetoric about vegans and vegetarians. The dialogue participants provide a discussion on how vegetarian dietsand vegan diets in particular-can progress individual and public human health, liberate non-human animals, improve the environment, and provide a vehicle in which several important social justice movements (for both humans and animals) can take root, all the while recognizing the many reasons reasons people might choose a vegetarian or vegan diet.
Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media. Edited by Cajetan Iheka. New York: MLA., 2022
In ecocritical postcolonial works of literature, the potential fluidity of sexual orientation and... more In ecocritical postcolonial works of literature, the potential fluidity of sexual orientation and identity can present a provocation to the rigidly dichotomous structuring by colonial forces—of nature as inferior to “civilization,” women as inferior to men, and animals as inferior to humans. An ecofeminist framework helps students engage with such texts and recognize the ways that they queer our understandings of indigenous and postcolonial sexualities as well as our embedded assumptions about pre-and postcolonial interactions with the natural world and its nonhuman species. I use Flora Nwapa’s foundational novel Efuru—the first English- language novel published by a Nigerian woman—to teach the intersections of queer theory, ecofeminism, and postcolonialism. While the work does not engage explicitly with queer identity, its presentation of its protagonist as a childless Igbo woman who worships the environmentally conscious goddess Uhamiri of Oguta Lake provides a lens for teaching alternative African sexualities, such as the socially sanctioned practice of Igbo women living with other women as “female husbands.” In discussing Efuru, I trace the ways two other works of postcolonial literature, the New Zealand author Keri Hulme’s novel The Bone People and the South African author J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, link sexuality to various postcolonial environments, because I want students to understand that sexualities—as well as environmental histories and ecological tragedies—vary from culture to culture and are affected by the colonial politics that have shaped landscapes and peoples. Further, I want to situate Efuru as both part of and distinct from a wider tradition of postcolonial environmental narratives in which characters eschew gender norms and expectations, norms and expectations that are dictated within indigenous cultures and im- posed on them by the mandates of Western imperialism.
The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror, 2015
Chapter 1 of The Vegan Studies Project Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (2015)
War and American Literature, 2021
Ecozon@, 2020
On November 5, 2019, 11,000 scientists from 153 countries declared a climate emergenc... more On November 5, 2019, 11,000 scientists from 153 countries declared a climate emergency, and their report presents in stark terms the nature and certainty of the crisis, providing six paths forward, one of which focuses on agriculture: “eating mostly plant-based foods while reducing the global consumption of animal products . . . can improve human health and significantly lower GHG emissions” (Ripple et al. 4). We have been given a plan to help us mediate this crisis, but what will it take for us to act on it, or, for that matter, to discuss the “animal question” in ways that are not predicated on vitriolic fear and willful disdain of plant-based consumption? In this essay, I offer a vegan studies approach as a theoretical and lived ecofeminist intervention in a political moment characterized by environmental uncertainty, overt racism, misogyny, and anti-immigrant policies that have become conflated with the presumed threat veganism poses to an increasingly authoritarian present.Keywords: Veganism, Green New Deal, climate crisis, United States politics.
McSweeney's Internet Tendency, 2020
Satire about reopening universities for face-to-face instruction during the Covid-19 pandemic. Pu... more Satire about reopening universities for face-to-face instruction during the Covid-19 pandemic. Published August 10, 2020.
Bifrost Online, 2020
The 1918 flu was avian in origin. COVID-19, the pandemic that is currently racing around the plan... more The 1918 flu was avian in origin. COVID-19, the pandemic that is currently racing around the planet, likely emerged from pangolins in a live animal market in Wuhan, China, but as Thom Van Dooren notes, if the pangolin “does turn out to be the unwitting and unwilling culprit behind this pandemic, this unlucky animal will join a long list of others whose life was cut short, whose species was endangered, and whose environment was destroyed, by a diverse range of ongoing human activities that are simultaneously helping to engineer new zoonotic diseases.” With attention to our Open Letter’s recognition of the fact that in the moment “a virus carries the message of our interbeing — across bodies, species, continents,” I offer a nonlinear plague genealogy situated within fiction and history in order to probe the social, environmental, and economic interconnections that underscore and complicate this Anthropocenic crisis.
(In)digestion in Literature and Film: A Transcultural Approach, 2020
New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Eds. Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann,. Palgrave McMillan, 2020: 99-116., 2020
Reading Coetzee's Women, 2019
This chapter is my attempt to read back to 2003 (and beyond) to explore Coetzee’s often combative... more This chapter is my attempt to read back to 2003 (and beyond) to explore Coetzee’s often combative and provocative Elizabeth Costello as a dialogic instigator who emerged during the interstitial space between his South African fictions and his citizenship in Australia, where he moved after publishing 1999s Disgrace. Over the last four decades, Coetzee’s engagement with white female subjectivity has taken three different yet sequential forms: first, via his female narrators Magda (1977), Susan Barton (1986), and Mrs Curren (1990) he has explored the ways in which white women’s voices enter into and are negated from male-dominated institutions like literary and social production. Second, in Disgrace (1999), he creates a narrative about the impossibility of the arrogant male belief that one can ‘be the woman’ (160), embody her narrative, and write her as anything other than his idea of her. Finally, in his creation of Elizabeth Costello (2003, 2005), Coetzee undertakes an act of dialogic drag that engages humour, satire, and parody to reveal the performative nature of gender, literary production, and authorship itself.
Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism, 2019
This is my introductory chapter from Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activ... more This is my introductory chapter from Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism.
Postcolonial Interventions, 2019
The concept of an imagined homogenizing shared cultural heritage worked to further the 19th Centu... more The concept of an imagined homogenizing shared cultural heritage worked to further the 19th Century “back to Africa” movement, which urged mem- bers of the African American diaspora to return to ancestral homelands in Africa (to which, because of their ancestral forced removal during slavery, they had no access), even as that narrative attened conceptions of African identity to a mythical ideal. Further, the production of mythic ctional Af- ricas – whether negative, as those recently constructed by Donald Trump’s assertion that African nations are “shithole” countries, or positive, as pos- ited in Stan Lee’s graphic novel Black Panther in 1966, at the height of the Civil Rights movement and reimagined by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the age of Trump – have worked to revisit and interrogate the way that citizens of the United States both imagine and often uncritically investigate our mediated understanding of Africa as inaccessible, mythical utopian homeland of the past and an enigmatic and often negatively connotated “third-world” of the present. In this essay, I discuss how the “back to Africa” mandate as manifest in the current political moment – as either an admonishment by racist white people (as against NFL players who protest) or embraced by African Amer- icans as a strategy for reconnection with an ancestral homeland (as in Black Panther) – depends upon the acceptance of a bifurcated identity that negates the liminal space of hyphenated “African-American” identity.
hinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory., 2018
In this essay, Wright traces her historical and personal understanding of vegan studies as it eme... more In this essay, Wright traces her historical and personal understanding of vegan studies as it emerged—unnamed—somewhere around 2003, when she was working on a doctoral dissertation on the works of South African novelist J. M. Coetzee. She then furthers the trajectory of vegan theory as a mode of politically engaged scholarly inquiry via a theoretical inquiry into the often-overt focus on veganism, tacit fear of politicized eating, and animal bodies that played a role in the 2016 US presidential election of Donald J. Trump.
Introduction to the edited special cluster on Vegan Studies in ISLE. Laura Wright; Introducing V... more Introduction to the edited special cluster on Vegan Studies in ISLE.
Laura Wright; Introducing Vegan Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, , isx070, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isx070
Through an examination of the politics of print culture that contributed to the 1740 continuation... more Through an examination of the politics of print culture that contributed to the 1740 continuation of Daniel Defoe’s 1724 Roxana, this essay brings the historical 18th- century playwright, novelist, and political pamphleteer Eliza Haywood into conversation with South African novelist J.M. Coetzee’s metafictional reworking of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana, Foe (1986). This essay places Haywood – whose novel The British Recluse (1722) is one of at least seven pre- existing texts that make up the “pastiche” (Seager, 2009, p. 370) that constitutes the 1740 Roxana – alongside Foe’s narrator Susan Barton, a character who constitutes “a pastiche of 18th-century heroines” (Maher 39), a woman who is “doubt itself” (Coetzee 133), uncertain of who controls the truth of her narrative, yet a woman who writes back to and against the narrative established for her by her male counterparts. Susan’s story of her life as a castaway on Cruso’s island is taken from her by Foe, Coetzee’s fictionalization of Daniel Defoe, who, instead of writing her requested The Female Castaway, writes her out of the narrative that becomes Robinson Crusoe, turning her instead into the narrator of Roxana. Spivak asks, “who is the female narrator of Robinson Crusoe?” And I answer: in a somewhat playful feminist act of resurrection, Eliza Haywood.
This essay examines the performative nature of the South African township tour in the constructio... more This essay examines the performative nature of the South African township tour in the construction of a specific tourist mythology with regard to landscape, gender politics, and racially defined social mobility in the so-called ‘new’ South Africa. As a counter to the tourism industry’s potentially reductive representations of not only the South African landscape (as at once uninhabited by people but populated by ‘exotic’ animals), but also of township spaces and residents, this chapter posits that an informed postcolonial ecofeminism informed by the South African philosophy of ubuntu can serve to help tourists more fully historicize the various social, political, and cultural realities that have displaced South Africans from specific spatial environments, more egalitarian and mutually beneficial gender roles, and mutually constitutive relationships with the land and animals.
This module addresses both aspects of climate literacy: understanding of climate science through ... more This module addresses both aspects of climate literacy: understanding of climate science through data analysis and interpretation, and understanding of literary tools and techniques through which climate science is portrayed. The module is designed to be completed in introductory natural science classes where literature is not typically included as well as in humanities classes where climate change science is not normally addressed. Students will engage in activities that address both climate change science and climate change literature, including graphing data, working in groups to analyze and interpret data, creating a concept map, conducting rhetorical analyses, and writing and responding to a blog.
SARX, 2023
Tell us about yourself and your book The Vegan Studies Project. My name is Laura Wright, and I am... more Tell us about yourself and your book The Vegan Studies Project.
My name is Laura Wright, and I am Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University in North Carolina. My scholarship and teaching have historically focused on postcolonial literatures, specifically the literatures of Nigeria, South Africa, India, and the Pacific Rim. My work has always examined the role of systematic and interconnected oppressions (of women, colonized subjects, animals, and the natural world) in various texts. I have been vegan since 2001, and I was vegetarian before that; I became vegetarian when I started college in 1988. I have written about my journey to veganism (by way of an eating disorder) in Defiant Daughters. I’ll attach that piece for your consideration. The Vegan Studies Project was my third monograph study, and it was the first work that I had written that examined US culture and media. It was published in 2015, and I have since gone on to edit and co-edit three scholarly volumes on vegan studies.
Medium (blog), 2021
Just a thing I wrote about the Texas abortion ban and then couldn't really figure out where I mig... more Just a thing I wrote about the Texas abortion ban and then couldn't really figure out where I might send it, so I just put it on Medium.
Cultural Ecologies of Food. University of Nevada Press, 2019
Interest in the vegan studies field continues to grow as veganism has become increasingly visible... more Interest in the vegan studies field continues to grow as veganism has become increasingly visible via celebrity endorsements and universally acknowledged health benefits, and veganism and vegan characters are increasingly present in works of art and literature. Through a Vegan Studies Lens broadens the scope of vegan studies by engaging in the mainstream discourse found in a wide variety of contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and news media.
Veganism is a practice that allows for environmentally responsible consumer choices that are viewed, particularly in the West, as oppositional to an economy that is largely dependent upon big agriculture. This groundbreaking collection exposes this disruption, critiques it, and offers a new roadmap for navigating and reimaging popular culture representations on veganism. These essays engage a wide variety of political, historical, and cultural issues, including contemporary political and social circumstances, emergent veganism in Eastern Europe, climate change, and the Syrian refugee crisis, among other topics.
Through a Vegan Studies Lens significantly furthers the conversation of what a vegan studies perspective can be and illustrates why it should be an integral part of cultural studies and critical theory. Vegan studies is inclusive, refusing to ignore the displacement, abuse, and mistreatment of nonhuman animals. It also looks to ignite conversations about cultural oppression
In assessing a pedagogical book, one of the most important questions to ask is, " Will this make ... more In assessing a pedagogical book, one of the most important questions to ask is, " Will this make our teaching better? " With Service Learning and Literary Studies, the answer is a resounding yes. The book is a timely and lucid guide to emerging practices in service learning. The introduction provides a well-articulated rationale for service learning and its relation to literary studies, while the individual chapters offer examples and practical advice for teachers interested in implementing service learning in their courses. In chapters devoted to a broad collection of literary forms, periods, and practices (including American and British literature and creative writing), the contributors describe a range of approaches. From proposals for situating the study of the nineteenth-century British reform novel in relation to public-service initiatives in major American cities to collaborative classes conducted in maximum security prisons, from life-writing work with seniors to volunteer work at the Sexual Assault Center of East Tennessee, each essay delivers a powerful and sustained argument for the interconnections between literary study and public service. Not only are these contributions well written, accessible, and engaging, they also cover service learning with students and community populations from a wide range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. As a whole, the book is at once a resource for practical ideas and a challenging work of literary studies, and it intervenes at a moment in which the possibility of this kind of service-based expansion is at the center of debates about the very nature of the humanities and the cultural role of higher education. Honorable Mention Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives, edited by Heidi Brayman Hackel and Ian Frederick Moulton, Options for Teaching Series (New York: Modern Language Association, 2015) This book provides inspiring and useful guidance on teaching literature in ways that utilize a range of resources to help students develop new practices for archival research. It combines theoretical grounding in the methods of archival work with lucid explanations of how these theories inform specific goals and activities in the classroom. The contributors expertly demonstrate how a range of archives offers new ways to explore transmission and reception, analyze content, and construct context. The contributors also address concerns about access to digital resources. Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives focuses on archives relevant to early modern English literature and history, yet the chapters apply to broader changes in the teaching of literature – and the humanities in general – with digital resources in today's classrooms.
Bifrost, 2020
The June 2020 issue of Bifrost brings together diverse contributions from the Environmental Human... more The June 2020 issue of Bifrost brings together diverse contributions from the Environmental Humanities community in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. The special issue features an Open Letter co-authored and signed by many leading voices from the Environmental Humanities, as well as some allied social scientists and activists, in response to the challenges of COVID-19.
A number of the Open Letter’s signatories have also contributed short companion essays reflecting on a range of questions raised by the pandemic. Together with a broad selection of open-access media resources curated from many sources, these essays open up a rich conversation concerning the present crisis. The essays also explore how Environmental Humanists can come together effectively in this precarious moment to build a community of purpose capable of promoting meaningful, long-term social-ecological change.
The Bifrost COVID-19 special issue is co-authored and co-edited by Steven Hartman, Serpil Opperman, Joni Adamson and Greta Gaard, with curation of selected media by Lea Rekow. It includes additional essays by Kate Rigby, Scott Slovic, David Pellow, Serenella Iovino, Richard Twine and Laura Wright.
The Open Letter co-authored by 41 Environmental Humanists, after many iterations that built on Greta Gaard's initial draft, can be endorsed by readers who support its commitments and principles. These new signatures can be added online, and will be archived publicly with the letter.
The Teaching Literature Book Award is an international, juried prize, awarded biennially by the f... more The Teaching Literature Book Award is an international, juried prize, awarded biennially by the faculty in the graduate programs in English at Idaho State University. This commendation discusses both the winning volume and an honorable mention.
Reading Coetzee's Women, 2019
This chapter is my attempt to read back to 2003 (and beyond) to explore Coetzee’s often combative... more This chapter is my attempt to read back to 2003 (and beyond) to explore Coetzee’s often combative and provocative Elizabeth Costello as a dialogic instigator who emerged during the interstitial space between his South African fictions and his citizenship in Australia, where he moved after publishing 1999s Disgrace. Over the last four decades, Coetzee’s engagement with white female subjectivity has taken three different yet sequential forms: first, via his female narrators Magda (1977), Susan Barton (1986), and Mrs Curren (1990) he has explored the ways in which white women’s voices enter into and are negated from male-dominated institutions like literary and social production. Second, in Disgrace (1999), he creates a narrative about the impossibility of the arrogant male belief that one can ‘be the woman’ (160), embody her narrative, and write her as anything other than his idea of her. Finally, in his creation of Elizabeth Costello (2003, 2005), Coetzee undertakes an act of dialogic drag that engages humour, satire, and parody to reveal the performative nature of gender, literary production, and authorship itself.
The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies, 2021
In this essay, Wright traces her historical and personal understanding of vegan studies as it eme... more In this essay, Wright traces her historical and personal understanding of vegan studies as it emerged—unnamed—somewhere around 2003, when she was working on a doctoral dissertation on the works of South African novelist J. M. Coetzee. She then furthers the trajectory of vegan theory as a mode of politically engaged scholarly inquiry via a theoretical inquiry into the often-overt focus on veganism, tacit fear of politicized eating, and animal bodies that played a role in the 2016 US presidential election of Donald J. Trump.
New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel, 2019
In 2008, Dan Bloom coined the term “cli-fi;” since then, study of this genre has become increasin... more In 2008, Dan Bloom coined the term “cli-fi;” since then, study of this genre has become increasingly popular. The appeal of examining fiction in terms of its focus on human-made climate change is unsurprising given our growing awareness of the ways that our actions are impacting the planet and given the increase in speculative fiction about the possible end results of unchecked human activity. In this essay, I analyse two very different novels that have been consistently characterised as cli-fi, Margaret Atwood’s 2003 Oryx and Crake and Ian McEwan’s 2010 Solar in terms of what they can teach us about climate change and how they might nudge us to different actions as well as the ways that both highlight the tensions between art and science.
Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue canadienne des études africaines, 2017
The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Pri... more The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work offers substantial pedagogical richness and challenges. Coetzee treats such themes as race, aging, gender, animal rights, power, violence, colonial history and accountability, the silent or silenced other, sympathy, and forgiveness in an allusive and detached prose that avoids obvious answers or easy ethical reassurance.Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," identifies secondary materials, including multimedia and Internet resources, that will help instructors guide their students through the contextual and formal complexities of Coetzee's fiction. In part 2, "Approaches," essays discuss how to teach works that are sometimes suspicious of teachers and teaching. The essays aim to help instructors negotiate Coetzee's ironies and allegories in his treatment of human relationships in a changing South Africa and of the shifting connections between human beings and the biosphere.
Ariel a Review of International English Literature, Oct 1, 2006
Mosaic, Mar 1, 2005
Psychological frameworks for both a national and sensible "imagined community" are soci... more Psychological frameworks for both a national and sensible "imagined community" are socially transmitted via photographic images and illustrations to the female protagonists of Atwood's Surfacing and Gordimer's July's People. This essay examines the protagonists' disruption of such visually instilled sensible and colonizing behaviour. ********** The photographic paradox can [...] be seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the "art," or the treatment, or the "writing," or the rhetoric, of the photograph).--Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message" In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the nation is an "imagined political community" because "the members of the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (6). Anderson locates the source of a national collective consciousness in the eighteenth century and claims that nationalism, as a mode of thought, filled the space left by the decline of religious thought during a period of increased secularization (11). He credits the printed text in the form of the novel and the newspaper as "two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century" (25). Both forms of discourse served to construct the imagined community of the nation; the daily newspaper became a collectively practiced prayer-like ritual that provided selective access to the rest of the world, and the novel allowed readers to experience the simultaneous occurrence of multiple events within a paradigm that conflated space and time in order to present concurrent narratives. According to Anderson, increased literacy and "print-capitalism [...] made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate to others, in profoundly new ways" (36). I would expand Anderson's argument by adding that particularly during the twentieth century, visual images, in the form of photographs and mixed commercial media, have played an increasingly significant role in the ways that people access imagined and mythical information about themselves as members of imagined social and national communities. Furthermore, while Anderson uses the concept of the imagined community explicitly to define the process of acquiring a national consciousness, a similar model can also be applied to the formation of a culture of sensibility, the socialization of manners and refined empathetic ability, that was also nascent in eighteenth-century England and is still prevalent in the industrialized West today. In fact, nationalism, or the ability to imagine a national community, is directly linked to the emergence of the artifice of sensibility cultivated by the middle class, the ability to imagine and empathize with the physical and mental situations of less fortunate members of society. Visual representations--in the form of photographs, film, magazine images, and artistically rendered illustrations--of both national and sensible forms of imagined communities are socially transmitted to and ultimately subverted by the female protagonists of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and Nadine Gordimer's July's People. In this essay, I examine the construction of sensible behaviour through these visual media as a colonizing agent in the lives of two white, middle class, female protagonists: Margaret Atwood's nameless narrator in Surfacing and Maureen, the South African, liberal protagonist in Nadine Gordimer's July's People. Both narratives position the protagonists in a period of interregnum, defined by Antonio Gramsci as the apocalyptic moment during which "the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms" (276). For Atwood's narrator, this interregnum is the time of looking for her missing father, a time that symbolically allows her to renegotiate her status as both Canadian and female and to deconstruct the other side of the binaries, American and male. …
Choice Reviews Online, 2016
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2014
African Studies Review, 2006
... 1). Zulu's story, in a sense, writes back to this "end," the invasion of the Z... more ... 1). Zulu's story, in a sense, writes back to this "end," the invasion of the Zulus as the British crossed the Mzinyathi River at ... that I, their son, was Azariah" (3). These Christian names are again paired with "two other names" (3), the Zulu names Celumusa and Jabulani, and Mbatha ...
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2012
Environmental History, 2011
Mosaic, 2005
Psychological frameworks for both a national and sensible "imagined community" are soci... more Psychological frameworks for both a national and sensible "imagined community" are socially transmitted via photographic images and illustrations to the female protagonists of Atwood's Surfacing and Gordimer's July's People. This essay examines the protagonists' disruption of such visually instilled sensible and colonizing behaviour. ********** The photographic paradox can [...] be seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the "art," or the treatment, or the "writing," or the rhetoric, of the photograph).--Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message" In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the nation is an "imagined political community" because "the members of the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (6). Anderson locates the source of a national collective consciousness in the eighteenth century and claims that nationalism, as a mode of thought, filled the space left by the decline of religious thought during a period of increased secularization (11). He credits the printed text in the form of the novel and the newspaper as "two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century" (25). Both forms of discourse served to construct the imagined community of the nation; the daily newspaper became a collectively practiced prayer-like ritual that provided selective access to the rest of the world, and the novel allowed readers to experience the simultaneous occurrence of multiple events within a paradigm that conflated space and time in order to present concurrent narratives. According to Anderson, increased literacy and "print-capitalism [...] made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate to others, in profoundly new ways" (36). I would expand Anderson's argument by adding that particularly during the twentieth century, visual images, in the form of photographs and mixed commercial media, have played an increasingly significant role in the ways that people access imagined and mythical information about themselves as members of imagined social and national communities. Furthermore, while Anderson uses the concept of the imagined community explicitly to define the process of acquiring a national consciousness, a similar model can also be applied to the formation of a culture of sensibility, the socialization of manners and refined empathetic ability, that was also nascent in eighteenth-century England and is still prevalent in the industrialized West today. In fact, nationalism, or the ability to imagine a national community, is directly linked to the emergence of the artifice of sensibility cultivated by the middle class, the ability to imagine and empathize with the physical and mental situations of less fortunate members of society. Visual representations--in the form of photographs, film, magazine images, and artistically rendered illustrations--of both national and sensible forms of imagined communities are socially transmitted to and ultimately subverted by the female protagonists of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing and Nadine Gordimer's July's People. In this essay, I examine the construction of sensible behaviour through these visual media as a colonizing agent in the lives of two white, middle class, female protagonists: Margaret Atwood's nameless narrator in Surfacing and Maureen, the South African, liberal protagonist in Nadine Gordimer's July's People. Both narratives position the protagonists in a period of interregnum, defined by Antonio Gramsci as the apocalyptic moment during which "the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms" (276). For Atwood's narrator, this interregnum is the time of looking for her missing father, a time that symbolically allows her to renegotiate her status as both Canadian and female and to deconstruct the other side of the binaries, American and male. …
It would be overstatement to claim that all of South African literature is characterized by its a... more It would be overstatement to claim that all of South African literature is characterized by its attention to Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci's theoretical interregnum, the temporal period during which "the old is dying, and the new cannot be born" (Gramsci 276). Nonetheless, South ...
The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies, 2021