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Iris Ralph Iris Ralph i(A107727 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 y separately published work icon Packing Death in Australian Literature : Ecocides and Eco-Sides Iris Ralph , London : Routledge , 2020 19932417 2020 multi chapter work criticism

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides addresses Australian Literature from ecocritical, animal studies, plant studies, indigenous studies, and posthumanist critical perspectives. The book’s main purpose is twofold: to bring more sustained attention to environmental, vegetal, and animal rights issues, past and present, and to do that from within the discipline of literary studies. Literary studies in Australia continue to reflect disinterest or not enough interest in critical engagements with the subjects of Australia’s oldest extant environments and other beings beside humans.

'Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides foregrounds the vegetal and nonhuman animal populations and contours of Australian Literature. Critical studies relied on in Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecocides and Eco-Sides include books by Simon C. Estok, Bill Gammage, Timothy Morton, Bruce Pascoe, Val Plumwood, Kate Rigby, John Ryan, Wendy Wheeler, Cary Wolfe, and Robert Zeller. The selected literary texts include work by Merlinda Bobis, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Nugi Garimara, Francesca Rendle-Short, Patrick White, and Evie Wyld.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.
1 Australian Tongue and Ag-gag Law Iris Ralph , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , no. 6 2016-2017; (p. 50-61) 'In this essay, I comment on two histories of animal farming in Australia in an ecocritical reading of several works of Australian literature: Tim Winton’s novel Shallows (1984), Susan Hawthorne’s collection of poetry, Cow (2011) and Francesca Rendle-Short’s novel Bite Your Tongue (2011). The first of those histories, the background of Shallows, refers to the whaling industry that operated in Western Australian waters up through the 1970s and the growing public awareness of that industry that eventually drove it to a halt in 1978, the year the main events of the novel take place. Cow and Bite Your Tongue, the texts that I mostly discuss, carry references to the history of industrial farming of cows in Australia, which, along with the industrial farming of other domesticated animal species, exploded after 1970 (in Australia and elsewhere in urban-industrialising countries), the same decade when Australians were beginning to rally behind animal rights activists’ opposition to whale slaughter. Today, almost half a century later, animal advocacy activists continue to raise pressing questions about animal species that are industrially farmed. They are doing so at the same time as the meat industry is attempting to restrict public access to and information about its operations. I address those questions in my reading of Hawthorne’s paean to cows and Rendle-Short’s references to the Moral Right movement in Queensland in the 1970s and attempts by its supporters to remove works of literature from school book shelves.' (Publication abstract)
1 The Systemic Approach, Biosemiotic Theory, and Ecocide in Australia Iris Ralph , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture , December vol. 16 no. 4 2014; In her article "The Systemic Approach, Biosemiotic Theory, and Ecocide in Australia" Iris Ralph summarizes an argument in defense of disciplinarity ("openness from closure") that Cary Wolfe makes in What is Posthumanism? She also comments on an implicit argument that Wendy Wheeler makes in The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture. As Ralph argues, Wheeler's implicit claim is that biosemiotic language, which humans share with other biological beings, connects human animals and nonhuman animals on moral and affective grounds. Ralph summarizes Wolfe's defense of disciplinarity that literary and cultural studies scholars who engage with the "question of the animal" generate claims which complement interrogations of the moral and affective distinctions between human animals and nonhuman animals. Ralph uses Wolfe's and Wheeler's arguments to read Nugi Garimara's Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Robyn Davidson's Tracks, and Xavier Herbert's Capricornia in an ecocritical context.' (Publication abstract)
1 A Green Flaw in the Crystal Glass : Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot Iris Ralph , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: Colloquy : Text Theory Critique , November no. 12 2006;

'The argument of this paper is that Mary Hare, one of the four principal characters in a slightly later novel by White, Riders in the Chariot, is the most pronounced of White's ecological avatars. She is a green interloper in the "glass house" (RC35) of Xanadu, an imposing estate on the outskirts of Sydney, built by Mary's father Norbert. Norbert's metaphysical pretensions, like the metaphysical pursuits of Voss, are deeply anthropocentric and blind him to the ecogenic subject of the ecogenic environment around him. He exploits it or disregards it in his design of Xanadu. The ecocritical content of Riders in the Chariot, and of White's writing as a whole, hardly has been spoken to by scholars. I argue this is central to any discussion of White and, further, that this content is central to White's metaphysical themes.'

Source: Colloquy : Text Theory Critique, no.12 November 2006 Sighted: 12/07/2007
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