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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Recalling Walden: Thoreau's Embodied Aesthetics And Australian Writings On Place, John Charles Ryan
Recalling Walden: Thoreau's Embodied Aesthetics And Australian Writings On Place, John Charles Ryan
Research outputs 2011
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 (1904-1994), and Joseph Jones (1908-1999), the article goes on to contextualize the discussion in the contemporary transhemispherical scholarship of Australian literary historian Harry Heseltine and American ecocritic Robert Zeller. Both syncretic and embodied, Thoreau’s literary approach to place draws from a fusion of multi-sensory experience, ethnographic inquiry, and bodily participation in …
Plants, Processes, Places: Sensory Intimacy And Poetic Enquiry, John Ryan
Plants, Processes, Places: Sensory Intimacy And Poetic Enquiry, John Ryan
Research outputs 2011
As an arts-based research approach, poetic enquiry has been theorised and applied recently in the social sciences and in education. In this article, I extend its usage to eco-critical studies of Australian flora and fauna. The Southwest corner of Western Australia affords opportunities to deploy arts-based methodologies, including field poetry, for celebrating the natural heritage of a region of distinguished biodiversity. I suggest that lyric practices in places such as Lesueur National Park and Anstey-Keane Damplands in southern Perth can catalyse embodied engagements with flora. The outcome of these practices is the invocation of the multiple senses— including the proximities …