Presented as part of the Literary Studies Seminar Series.

Dr Barbara Holloway will speak about : When Absence feels like Presence: Affect and Writing Australian Forest Imaginary

The ‘undead’, in Eric Santner’s term, have a ‘dimension of surplus animation’ that he detects in the world of things encountered when transformed by death or decay. This paper — adopting Meaghan Morris’s approach of speaking from local environment and experience first — begins in an area of forest in central NSW characterised by stumps and dead trees. These, all showing marks of saw, axe and ring-barking, have a strange presence, leading into notions of ‘natural historical fissures or caesuras in the space of meaning’. The stumps and tree-skeletons perhaps ‘act’ as catalysts and magnets in a complex of changing emotions.

Though the numerous projections of ‘melancholy’ onto the living forests in Australia’s settler culture have often been discussed, the changing emotional meaning of these remnants in and of the forest has not.  A close reading of literary and popular texts by writers like Mary Gilmore and Kevin Gilbert finds ‘sympathy’, fear and apprehension in popular lore of falling branches, climate change and settler-triumph. ‘Surplus animation’ finds its way outwards as text contributing to and influenced by a transnational colonial and environmental imaginary negotiating the human and environmental transformations accompanying colonisation.

Barbara Holloway has written extensively on ‘place’ in Australian literary culture and has also published works of creative non-fiction. She is a Visiting Fellow in SLLL at ANU.