This talk takes as a point of departure the so-called “Anthropocene haze” that envelops Alexis Wright’s 2023 novel Praiseworthy. I read this haze both materially and rhetorically: that is, as naming the atmospheric disturbance that spurs the novel’s plot and as prefiguring the rhetorical techniques of obfuscation and non-containment that define the novel’s form. Reading Praiseworthy in the shadow of the 2008 Northern Territory National Emergency Response, I suggest that Wright theorizes settler colonialism’s determining relation to environmental crisis through form and rhetoric rather than strictly through diegetic representation. More broadly, I consider the question of ecology’s totalizing horizon—what Édouard Glissant calls its “mysticism”—to ask how attention to literary form reveals a mode of ecologically-minded critique that disorders durable appeals to relation in liberal (eco)criticism.

Brennan McCracken is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at Concordia University, and an Affiliate of the Centre for Expanded Poetics.