Much like the supplement itself, the anthology received both praise and critique, further encouraging its popularity, multiple editions and eventual incorporation into secondary school reading lists. Keywords: Ecological humanities, environmental history, ecophilosophy, ecocriticism, decolonisation, AustraliaĮmerging out of La Zona de Contacto (The Contact Zone), the youth-oriented pop culture literary supplement of the right-wing Chilean newspaper El Mercurio, the short story anthology of emerging Chilean narrators Cuentos con walkman (Fuguet and Gómez, Planeta, 1993) made waves within Chilean literary space. In reflecting on the Australian experience from my current vantage-point in England, I hope to give impetus to the further development of the environmental humanities in the UK and Ireland as a richly inter- and transdisciplinary field, in which ecocritics might be drawn into new kinds of collaboration and forms of knowledge. Crossing the divides between the natural and social sciences and the arts and humanities, as well as between western and other (especially, Aboriginal) ways of knowing, this project also had an expressly decolonial agenda. Whereas in the US, and to some extent also in the UK, environmental humanities are seen to be closely associated with literary studies, in Australia, the project of the ‘ecological humanities’, inaugurated at the Australian National University in the late 1990s, was more firmly located in environmental history, ecophilosophy, and ethnography (especially Aboriginal Studies).
This article contributes an Australian perspective to this special issue’s exploration of the parameters of the emerging cross-disciplinary field of the environmental humanities, and its relationship to ecocriticism. In considering the worldly text as an articulation of the literature-place interface, we investigate how images and affects from Helen Garner's 1977 novel Monkey Grip influence understandings and formations of place in Melbourne, specifically how the text reflexively participates in processes of urban transformation in the city's iconic inner northern suburbs of Fitzroy and Carlton. It is an actor in the material production of place. The worldly text is more than a mirror or commentator on place. We call these types of literary texts the worldly text. Our objective here is to provide an account of how literature might produce place or more specifically, an account of how certain literary texts contribute to the production of place in material, and more-than-literary, ways. This essay is an intervention in disciplinary and interdisciplinary conceptualisations of literature and place where the text is positioned as a product of place.
Journal: cultural geographies Manuscript ID CGJ-17-0076.R4 Manuscript Type: Article Abstract: Literature about place is frequently conceived by writers and readers as a response to, or a reproduction of, place.
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