Search

The 2019 Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference took as its theme the subject of 'dirt', and inspired this paper which examines the 'journeys into dirt' by explorer figures in Patrick White's 1957 novel Voss and Robyn Davidson's 1980 memoir Tracks. Drawing on theory of dirt developed by material ecocritic Helen Sullivan and by philosopher Olli Lagerspetz we demonstrate that the narratives of their travels show them engaged in transformative encounters with the Australian desert. In doing so we challenge Tom Lynch's reading of the two texts as 'traversals' which portray the desert as 'alien, hostile and undifferentiated void'. Using Keith Garebian's distinction between 'desert' and 'garden' we examine how these explorers find and respond to 'the garden in the desert'. Davidson couches her memoir as an exploration narrative and treats the desert as a 'lived space' which she 'writes home'; having learned how to 'be' in it, and so to 'recover' the garden in the desert. Like her, Voss and his companions experience the desert as beautiful and inspirational, even, at times, nurturant and sustaining. Since Voss's orientation is spiritual and transcendent, however, White's treatment of the desert shows conceptual and corporeal boundaries between human and environment shifting and fading in their interaction with it. In both texts episodes occur of immersion in dirt – dust in Tracks and mud in Voss – which serve to illustrate and to emphasise the interconnectedness we humans have with the essential, elemental environment of dirt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference took as its theme the subject of ‘dirt’, and inspired this paper which examines the ‘journeys into dirt’ by explorer figures in Patrick White’s 1957 novel Voss and Robyn Davidson’s 1980 memoir Tracks. Drawing on theory of dirt developed by material ecocritic Helen Sullivan and by philosopher Olli Lagerspetz we demonstrate that the narratives of their travels show them engaged in transformative encounters with the Australian desert. In doing so we challenge Tom Lynch’s reading of the two texts as ‘traversals’ which portray the desert as ‘alien, hostile and undifferentiated void’. Using Keith Garebian’s distinction between ‘desert’ and ‘garden’ we examine how these explorers find and respond to ‘the garden in the desert’. Davidson couches her memoir as an exploration narrative and treats the desert as a ‘lived space’ which she ‘writes home’; having learned how to ‘be’ in it, and so to ‘recover’ the garden in the desert. Like her, Voss and his companions experience the desert as beautiful and inspirational, even, at times, nurturant and sustaining. Since Voss’s orientation is spiritual and transcendent, however, White’s treatment of the desert shows conceptual and corporeal boundaries between human and environment shifting and fading in their interaction with it. In both texts episodes occur of immersion in dirt – dust in Tracks and mud in Voss – which serve to illustrate and to emphasise the interconnectedness we humans have with the essential, elemental environment of dirt.

The celebrated final scenes of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novel, “Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana”, find detective Ingravallo pursuing a clue as he investigates the brutal murder of Liliana Balducci, an upper-middle-class inhabitant of an apartment on the street of the novel’s title. The location for the book’s concluding showdown is a dilapidated house, or an “oikos”, to borrow from the Greek, into which the Investigator, an outsider, is introduced. “Oikos”, which became the prefix “eco” in both “economics” (literally, law of the house) and “ecology” (or, study of the house) here provides a dynamic lens for the final scenes of the Pasticciaccio, and for viewing its unremitting tension between singularity and generality, interiority and exteriority, anthropic and geological time, human and posthuman. Our article proposes the space of the impoverished Roman household as a key to entering the Gaddian narrative architecture, a space that resonates with what Jeffery Jerome Cohen describes as “the tangled, fecund, and irregular pluriverse humans inhabit along with lively and agency-filled objects, materials, and forces” (Prismatic Ecology, xxiii). The dwelling on Via Merulana, and even more distinctly the house (or hovel) in which the novel ends, challenge our notions of domestic spaces, their porosity, and their proper inhabitants. In fact, in the narrative’s exploration of these two houses and their occupants, we find intriguing portraits of the tensions that trouble the supposed borders of the human and the posthuman. The “Pasticciaccio”, as we argue, closes (or opens) the door on a narrative architecture of polarity, where material and ontological tensions lead to both human and posthuman conclusions.

Using sport as a lens to illuminate a path for broader cultural analysis, this essay argues for a three-pronged theoretical approach to the critique of commodity value in contemporary narratives. Three elements of an analytic strategy for the critique of commodity aesthetics are considered. First, the concept of communicative dirt posed by Leach (1976) and Hartley (1984) is considered in the service of creating commodity value from the cultural logic of sport. Second, the merits of a reader-oriented approach as used in literary criticism, reliant on understandings of Fish's (1976) notion of interpretive community and the variant ways that texts work to control reading, are considered as complementary to understanding the workings of communicative dirt. Third, the value of ethical criticism in providing an overarching frame for deconstructing the manufacture of commodity value, including strategies for using communicative dirt to construct readers and control the reading act, is assessed. A case study of a television commercial “banned” from the 2005 Super Bowl broadcast illustrates the tripartite approach. In conclusion, the study argues for the applicability of this dirty theory of narrative ethics to postmodern concerns with media in increasingly commodified contemporary culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]