Please join us for a CuSPP Seminar in person (BPB W3.03) and online on Thursday 24 April from 1-2. Please refer to the CuSPP email or email Wesley.Lim@anu.edu.au for the link.

This thesis explores how Patrick White’s fiction unsettles inherited distinctions, particularly between nature and culture, through shifting narrative forms and relational modes of perception. Through readings of novels and stories written across White’s career, including The Aunt’s Story and Voss to The Tree of Man and The Cockatoos, the thesis examines how his fiction approaches questions of subjectivity, perception and environment.

The thesis draws on ecological, philosophical and anthropological approaches, such as ancient cosmology, environmental thought and relational thinking, to consider how White’s fiction resists interpretive closure and invites more dynamic ways of reading. Structured across five chapters, the thesis moves from a critical overview of White’s reception and criticism to close readings that examine movement, perception, landscape and literary form.

Across these analyses, particular attention is given to how White’s narratives disrupt linear progression and symbolic order, foregrounding disjunction, simultaneity and entangled modes of perception. By remaining with the unsettled textures of White’s fiction, the thesis proposes a mode of reading attuned to instability, relation and the more-than-human dimensions of narrative form.

Miriam Potter is a PhD candidate jointly enrolled at the Australian National University and Sorbonne Université, working on the ecological dimensions of Patrick White’s fiction. Alongside her academic work she has spent over eighteen years as an ecologist with Robin des Bois, a non-governmental environmental organisation, and currently lectures in English at Sorbonne Université. Her research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship and reflects a long-standing engagement with both environmental activism and the humanities.