ANNIE PROULX’S BIRD CLOUD AND ‘LITERATURE OF HOPE’

The paper focuses on Annie Proulx’s non-fiction work Bird Cloud and explores some of the ideas Proulx has postulated in her fiction, novels and short stories: a sense of place, home-ness, the history and archaeology of place, the sense of (non)-belonging, or conjunction and disjunction to use Slovic’s terms. Travel and relocation, prominent features of Proulx’s work, are what Barry Lopez describes as means of overcoming disjunction in remote locations and of cultivating intimacy with the landscape. Eventually they give rise to a fictional representation of landscape. We may conclude that for Proulx landscape writing becomes a “literature of hope” that

NARRATIVE SOVEREIGNTY, EMOTIONS AND INTERSPECIES RELATIONSHIPS

This article engages the claim that narrative is crucial to humans’ capacity to imagine and to know other animals. It brings together the concept of political sovereignty from Derrida, with an evaluation of emotion to analyse narratives about interspecies relationships. I begin by mapping Derrida’s critique of the relationship between violence and scientific knowledge about animals (Derrida 2009: 276–304) onto recent research into relationships between people and dingoes on K’gari (Fraser Island), to delineate how violent epistemologies may underpin humans’ ways of knowing other animals. I then explore the politics of the public education about dingoes on K’gari as they relate to government policies and the way the state exercises power; such state-sanctioned narratives set the discursive tone for the way people know and interact with (this) other species, and disallow other epistemologies. In contrast, creative nonfiction narrators Barry Lopez (Of Wolves and Men, 2004) and Helen Macdonald (H Is for Hawk, 2014) perform their own critiques of inaccurate and controlling narratives about, respectively, wolves and goshawks. I argue that the techniques they use—acknowledging emotion; observing animals’ perceptions, relationships and agency; respecting animals’ ability to resist human-imposed meanings; recognising the limits of human knowledge; and incorporating other voices—provide a framework for how creative writers may narrateother animals more ethically and more accurately.

Wolves

The story of Francis and the wolf of Gubbio occasions the author’s trek into the Absaroka Mountains near Yellowstone, entering a territory where gray wolves have thrived since being reintroduced the 1990s. The inordinate hatred of wolves in Western thought is contrasted with Francis’s concern not to kill (or even to tame) the wolf, but to welcome it into a larger family where all species can thrive. Over the centuries the wolf’s stealthy elusiveness has led us to project a sinister quality onto these extraordinary animals. Barry Lopez speaks of our theriophobia, our irrational, deep-seated fear of the “beast.” It evokes an impulse to kill what we don’t understand. Yet gradually we’re learning to appreciate wolves without demonizing (or romanticizing) them. By the time Aldo Leopold wrote his Sand County Almanac, you could discern a shift in societal perceptions of apex predators. He spoke of grieving as he knelt beside a wolf he had shot, watching “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” He also noticed how the absence of wolves allowed the deer population to explode, with every edible tree stripped of its leaves.

Spirits of Pilgrimage, Peregrination, and Re-Placement

Movement, immigration, and pilgrimage have long been keynotes of American experience. Following the opening chapter’s attention on the spiritual inscape of home dwellings, this chapter concerns itself with the spirituality of motion, re-placement, and pilgrimage as reflected in American works of literary imagination. Lead characters in this story include travelers, explorers, and would-be pilgrims as well as resettlers—that is, those who leave their place of birth to adopt another as their own. The religious implications of these peregrinations and adoptions are considered in relation to prose texts by Carolyn Servid, Barry Lopez, John Muir, N. Scott Momaday, Gary Snyder, and others. These texts often associate their spirituality of place with reverence for what’s found in the going there rather than in the getting there. Developing the theme of localism versus globalism, this chapter concludes by assessing two versions of globally engaged localism as represented in works by Wendell Berry and David Haskell.