Resonance, reconnection, reparation: Judith Wright's radical "Green" writing project

Abstract

In this thesis I argue that Judith Wright is a dynamic and complex thinker whose coherent ecological vision can still challenge us. In addition to placing Wright’s work into its historical context, I reconsider it from a contemporary perspective. In so doing, I show that she is not a nostalgic figure who wrote nature poems, but a radical ecological thinker, a writer of ecopoetry, and a proto-ecophilosopher. Her informed ecological vision becomes more relevant as green movements multiply around the world. In the first part of the thesis, “Resonance”, I describe the range of cultural contexts within which Wright developed intellectually, and position her ideas in relation to currents in national and international thought. I identify the gaps in the research on Wright from an ecocritical perspective, and chart the development of her thinking in the direction of an articulated ecophilosophy. The two overarching concerns of Wright’s life and poetry were the human destruction of the natural world, and the dispossession of Australia’s Indigenous inhabitants, and I show how these themes can already be discerned in Wright’s earliest prose and poetry, arguing that she was part of the “first-wave” of philosophical environmentalism in the early part of the twentieth century. In the second part of the thesis, “Reconnection”, I examine Wright’s growing ecological consciousness in light of such thinking, with a particular emphasis on Australia and Scandinavia, both sites of early radical ecology. I also indicate how she sought to forge a poetic language of place and “nature.” “Reparation” charts the development of Wright as a radical ecological thinker, in the context of her work for reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. I introduce Australian ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood’s concept of a radical, critical, “green” ecological writing project, and make a case for Wright as a formative and radical ecological writer and thinker and an ecoprophetic voice, pointing to connections between Wright’s and Plumwood’s thinking, as well as between that of Wright and Timothy Morton. I ask if it is possible to do more than stay with a dying world, as Morton concludes. Wright continued to stress the importance of what she called a feeling response to the world, stressing that feeling consists of both imaginative capacity and active interaction with the world.