ORCID Profile
0000-0003-4269-0276
Current Organisations
La Trobe University
,
Deakin University
,
University of Melbourne
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Publications
Evolving a New, Ecological Posthumanism: An Ecocritical Comparison of Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2020
Review of *Learning to Live with Climate Change: From Anxiety to Transformation* by Blanche Verlie
Publisher: Australian Literary Studies
Date: 11-12-2022
Moving Beyond a Strange Spectatorship
Publisher: Association for the Study of Literature, Environment & Culture Australia & New Zealand
Date: 05-07-2023
DOI: 10.60162/SWAMPHEN.9.17542
Abstract: What can nonhuman road trauma, more commonly referred to as ‘roadkill’, teach us about ecological crises and human culpability? Incidents of nonhuman road trauma could be described as strange encounters, revealing the shared trauma of the nonhumans and humans involved while simultaneously highlighting the supposed inevitability of such events. I argue that the choice to check the rearview mirror – to exhibit attentiveness and care in self-reflection – is an act of radical correspondence with the more-than-human. Such correspondence functions as a kind of non-spoken letter to both nonhumans and other human drivers a letter calling for acts of care and attentiveness that acknowledge the nonhuman experience, mourn losses, and possibly instigate radical change when it comes to how nonhuman road trauma is thought about now and hopefully avoided in future. In her work on the ‘Anthropocene noir’, Deborah Bird Rose speaks of ‘the Anthropocene parallel’ in which humans are spectators of the suffering of nonhumans, and also spectators of a suffering that is our own. Written as both an essay and a personal log of my own experiences with nonhuman road trauma, this work draws on Rose’s idea in an attempt to reconcile the concept of what I term a ‘strange spectatorship’, in which humans observe, are implicated in, and turn away from the phenomenon of nonhuman road trauma and what such trauma reveals about human-nonhuman relations, particularly for settler-colonial Australians. Reflecting on anecdotal experiences as well as the representation of roadkill in Australian literature, I explore the strangeness perceived in how settler-colonial Australians are both actors and spectators in nonhuman road trauma. I grapple with the idea of such trauma as a means of better understanding the settler-colonial impact on Australian natural environments, and the consequences for both humans and nonhumans if we do not better address the ethical and ecological consequences of our modern road infrastructure.
Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam and Finding a Postpandemic Kinship in the COVID-19 Era
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Date: 04-2022
DOI: 10.3828/EXTR.2022.5
Unsettlement, Climate and Rural/Urban Place-Making in Australian Crime Fiction
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 30-08-2023
Seeking Greener Pages: An Analysis of Reader Response to Australian Eco-Crime Fiction
Publisher: Association for the Study of Australian Literature
Date: 05-2023
DOI: 10.56449/14233338
Related Organisations
Related Funding Activities
No related grants have been discovered for Rachel Fetherston.