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Border Crossing in the New Literature of Place

The new American nature writing is positioned at the borders drawn between the natural and the social, the human and the non-human, the civilized and the wild. In some contemporary works, the attempt to cross these borders has the perverse effect of reproducing them, or rather of revealing how the boundary lines move with the itinerant subject. Oth...

Oscar, Derrida's Cat, and Other Knowing Animals

In confrontations with animals, particularly in circumstances involving death, human knowledge suddenly appears limited. Other forms of knowledge have to be taken into account. The case of Oscar, the cat who predicts patients' death in a Rhode Island hospital, indicates that animals know things that are concealed from us. Our knowledge is limited, ...

Recalling Walden: Thoreau’s Embodied Aesthetics and Australian Writings on Place

This essay argues that the works of the nineteenth-century American philosopher, poet, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) have moulded Australian place writings of the last one hundred years. Beginning with the foundational work into Australian literature done by the American critics C. Hartley Grattan (1902-1980), A. Grove Day (1904-19...

Designating the Environment: Deixis and Nature Writing in the Poetries of Philip Whalen and Merrill Gilfillan

La poésie de la nature se caractérise par une sur-utilisation de la deixis. Mais cette utilisation n’est pas homogène dans le temps. La comparaison des textes de deux auteurs, l’un associé à la Beat Generation, l’autre contemporain de la mouvance Language fait apparaître des différences significatives dans l’utilisation de la deixis ; mais ces diff...

Ce que l’écriture peut pour la nature: entretien avec Patrick Chamoiseau

Ecologies of the Beachcomber in Colonial Australian Literature

Ideas of the beachcomber as part castaway, part vagabond – the ragged figure of the ex-sailor or convict searching for a better life somewhere in the islands of the Pacific – are no longer so familiar as they were during the nineteenth century. Beachcombing today is more often associated with scanning the shoreline to collect shipwrecked objects or...

The evolution of environmental ideas in the city : the activist work of three Los Angeles artists

The paper explores the activities of three Los Angeles artists and activists, Lewis MacAdams, Lauren Bon and Jennifer Price, who suggest a shift from the paradigm of a distinction between civilisation and nature in US culture, to a more holistic form. The object that materialises this hybrid state in their work is the Los Angeles River. They aim at...