“Anyone can find hope in the stories”

: developing a reparative poetics in the novels of Richard Flanagan and Alexis Wright

Abstract

This thesis considers the novels of contemporary Australian authors Alexis Wright and Richard Flanagan through the lens of a reparative poetics – a conceptual framework that draws on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ideas of reparative and paranoid reading practices. Reparative reading was a response to the hermeneutics of suspicion that Sedgwick claimed inhibited twentieth-century literary criticism and theory. Extending this position, this thesis argues that through a reparative poetics – a range of literary techniques and approaches, including unreliable narration, dialogism, transculturation, opacity, orality and time – Wright and Flanagan contest dominant paradigms of knowledge in Western modernity and platform other modes of understanding and experience. These alternate modes challenge the inheritance of Enlightenment systems of thought that are preoccupied with teleological ideas of progress. Showing how these ideas have contributed to the challenges of the Anthropocene – predominantly the crisis of climate change and the ongoing realities of colonialism – this thesis will articulate how the novels of Wright and Flanagan employ a reparative poetics to push back against these realities and explore a rich diversity of alternate futures. In Flanagan’s work, these alternatives emerge via his subversion of ossified, univocal understandings of Tasmania’s colonial history, whilst Wright incorporates Indigenous modes of knowledge into the contemporary novel to communicate alternative lifeworlds in pursuit of what she terms Indigenous Sovereignty. In developing a reparative poetics, I propose a practical approach to how the authors use their novels to inform more ethical and environmentally sustainable modes of being.

Date of Thesis submission	2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Lorraine Sim (Supervisor) & Anthony Uhlmann (Supervisor)