Naslov
Un/doing Climate Change in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book and Ellen van Neerven’s “Water”

Autori
Polak, Iva

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Poglavlja u knjigama, znanstveni

Knjiga
Green Matters: Ecocultural Functions of Literature

Urednik/ci
Loeschnigg, Maria ; Braunecker, Melanie

Izdavač
Brill ; Rodopi

Grad
Leiden : Boston (MA)

Godina
2020

Raspon stranica
185-200

ISBN
987-90-40886-9

ISSN
1572-4344

Ključne riječi
Alexis Wright ; The Swan Book ; Ellen van Neerven ; Water ; Anthropocene ; Timothy Morton ; future past

Sažetak
This chapter considers two recent works by Australian Aboriginal authors, Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book (2013) and Ellen van Neerven’s novella ‘Water’ (2014), as fiction voicing environmental and ecological concerns. Since the works appeared after the so-called mining boom in Australia, the authors lay bare Australia’s ecological paradox and comment on the consequences of Australia’s environmental policy, which tends to reject anthropogenic climate change. The Swan Book and ‘Water’ fit into climate fiction, which, as Dan Bloom argues, takes “the position that climate change and global warming are real and are happening”. Both works construct “future history” (Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.) of Australia based on Aboriginal experience of the destruction of the country/culture, and at the same time scrutinize Timothy Morton’s claim from Dark Ecology (2016) that, in the Anthropocene, the detective is the criminal. It will be argued that both works, owing to their culture- specific place of utterance, attempt to un/do the epistemological hierarchy of the ‘we’ of the Anthropocene, which has caused the profit- driven destruction of the landscape. However, the consequential un/ doing may not provide the reader with an easy answer.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Književnost

POVEZANOST RADA