Huggan, G (2017) Last whales: Eschatology, extinction, and the cetacean imaginary in Winton and Pash. Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 52 (2). pp. 382-396. ISSN 0021-9894
Abstract
Few of the earth’s creatures capture the popular imagination quite like the whale, which has come to serve as an ambivalent figure for both salvation and perdition, whether the moral dramas that unfold around it are seen in religious (eschatological) or scientific (ecological) terms. Whales are at once signifiers for extinction, pointing to the threat of planetary destruction, and signifiers for redemption, in which the ongoing environmentalist campaign for protection doubles as a human struggle to save us from ourselves. This article looks at two contemporary Australian literary texts, Tim Winton’s Shallows (1985) and Chris Pash’s The Last Whale (2008), both of which explore competing extinction scenarios: the extinction of whales; the extinction of the whaling industry; and the extinction of whaling as a way of life. Given the further possibility of human self-extinction, the article argues that a new cetacean imaginary is needed in which whales are seen as complex manifestations of a life that co-exists with humanity, but is neither reducible to human understandings of history nor to the various futures — or non-futures — that human beings might imagine for themselves.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2015, the Author(s). This is an author produced version of a paper published in Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Australian literature; Australian whaling industry; cetacean imaginary; ecology; environmentalism; eschatology; extinction; time |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of English (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 21 Dec 2015 13:34 |
Last Modified: | 18 Jul 2017 05:57 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0021989415623604 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:92639 |