International Regionalism as American-Australian Dialogue: the literary and psychological terrains of William James and Henry David Thoreau in John Kinsella's 'Jam Tree Gully: Poems'

Abstract

"We wade through senses we can't name but know are there, bothering blood." --John Kinsella, 'Spring Pollen'. Ecocriticism is engaged with the ideas of bioregional literature, an international response to common concerns of depleted biodiversity, the rate of species loss and anthropogenic climate change. Issues with respect to viewing the environment from multiple vantage points, with discrete emphases on values located within each perspective, are amplified when text and world are framed in terms of scale. The paradigm of the ecosystem and the emphasis this places on interconnection and interdependency can be neither conceptually fixed nor reduced to one vantage point that runs across all these acute architectonics of understanding and representation of human to non-human relations; these 'situated microknowledges' - or locally anchored events in specific spaces and times - give rise to discrete ethical orientations, and rhetorical and poetic formulations in each instance. In this light, the European pastoral of the idealised life of the shepherd appears antiquated if it were to be employed to fit the human expression of the rural environment to local-global issues beyond the vantage point of the human scale, as identified above.