TY  - JOUR
A1  - Crane, Kylie Ann
T1  - Anthropocene Presences and the Limits of Deferral
T2  - Open library of humanities
N2  - Literary criticism, particularly ecocriticism, occupies an uneasy position with regard to activism: reading books (or plays, or poems) seems like a rather leisurely activity to be undertaking if our environment—our planet—is in crisis. And yet, critiquing the narratives that structure worlds and discourses is key to the activities of the (literary) critic in this time of crisis. If this crisis manifests as a ‘crisis of imagination’ (e.g. Ghosh), I argue that this not so much a crisis of the absence of texts that address the environmental disaster, but rather a failure to comprehend the presences of the Anthropocene in the present. To interpret (literary) texts in this framework must entail acknowledging and scrutinising the extent of the incapacity of the privileged reader to comprehend the crisis as presence and present rather than spatially or temporally remote. The readings of the novels Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013) by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright (Australia) trace the uneven presences of Anthropocenes in the present by way of bringing future worlds (The Swan Book) to the contemporary (Carpentaria). In both novels, protagonists must forge survival amongst ruins of the present and future: the depicted worlds, in particular the representations of the disenfranchisement of indigenous inhabitants of the far north of the Australian continent, emerge as a critique of the intersections of capitalist and colonial projects that define modernity and its impact on the global climate.
Y1  - 2019
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/50724
SN  - 2056-6700
VL  - 5
IS  - 1
PB  - Open library of humanities
CY  - Cambridge
ER  -