AustLit

'The inclusion of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) in the core syllabus (tronc commun) of the 2022 Agrégation competitive exam – for both the “internal” and “external” examination1 – is a cause for celebration. Before the inclusion of Carpentaria, Australian literature had featured only once in the national syllabus, in the literary option, with Patrick White’s Voss (1957) in 1977 – 45 years ago – and writing that is not from the UK, Ireland, or the United States usually featured in the optional literary strand of the syllabus. The addition of a second work of Australian literature, but more importantly the inclusion, for the very first time in the history of the Agrégation, of a work of Aboriginal literature in the core syllabus of the competitive exam, has been the source of great joy amongst students in France and academics working in France and other countries. What an honour to be given this opportunity to focus intensely on Carpentaria and Aboriginal literature.' (Introduction)

(Publication abstract)

'Why is Carpentaria so challenging – yet so liberating – to read? How can Carpentaria deal so frankly with trauma and tragedy – yet be so healing and hope-inspiring? Answers to those paradoxes are ventured by this article, which suggests that Carpentaria’s narrative style replicates a psychological effect of oral storytelling, remaking the conventional literary experience of reading a novel.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper revolves around the core principles of story-creation as defined by First Peoples in Australia. It focusses on the many dimensions of this distinctive narrative approach in Alexis Wright’s magnum opus, Carpentaria (2005). Indigenous Australian notions of time, place and story-making are crucial to the argument. Finally, the paper interrogates the links between the poetic and story-telling oeuvre of the famous Indigenous Australian leader and poet of the 1960s and 1970s – Oodgeroo – and the masterful novelistic approach to story-telling exemplified by Carpentaria.'(Publication abstract)

'While G.S. Fraser sees good free verse as “verse which does not scan regularly but seems always on the verge of scanning regularly” (1970, 74), I argue that Alexis Wright’s epic prose in Carpentaria sounds as if it were verging on poetry from the English tradition, blended with a local Indigenous oral tradition and Waanyi language. Using structuring devices occasionally borrowed from the English poetic tradition as well as from Waanyi, her prose achieves mnemonic functions, inscribing the novel as a memorial epic in a new epic diction, and glorifying the act of writing, as well as the use of orality.'(Publication abstract)

'Although many critics have emphasized the tragic and political dimension of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), this article focuses on the novel’s use of humor and a comic structure in exploring Desperance, an isolated town in the North of Australia. An Indigenous narrator sets the humorous tone, conveying stories light and dark centered on the residents of Pricklebush, the Indigenous settlement on the fringe: their conflicts with each other; their vexed relations with Uptown, the white section; and their relationship with the powerful Gurfurritt mine. Despite the novel’s dark episodes, its comic dimension fulfills the promise of a finale defined by hope.' (Publication abstract)

'A number of critics have deployed the generic category of magical realism in reading Alexis Wright’s novel, Carpentaria. While accepting that the novel has something in common with this generic classification and a relation to texts and writers associated with it, this essay seeks to show the limitations inherent in reducing Carpentaria to this (or other) generic classifications. While Carpentaria enacts and explores elements of the representation of time and the sacred that are congruent to magical realism, it also refuses to be reduced to either magical realism or genre as such.'(Publication abstract)

'This paper analyzes the way in which Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria recreates the space of Indigenous country. Looking at the environment and the focus on locality from a regional perspective, I argue that geographic space is used as a subversive place of reality and history so that Indigeneity is a matter of intersubjective relations (M. Langton) and is constantly conceptualized in a process of dialogue, representation, and imagination. I thus examine the focal positioning of the natural environment to show how the manifestation of place and Dreaming tracks annihilate an imagined colonial reality and tend to reconfigure the postcolonial present.' (Publication abstract)

'Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria was translated by Li Yao into Chinese in 2012. The following text describes Li Yao’s personal reflections on this translation, the reasons for Carpentaria’s success in China, and connected projects that the translation has led to. Beside promoting Aboriginal literature in China, translating Carpentaria has allowed Li Yao to build connections with Alexis Wright, as well as with fellow academics working in other Chinese universities and Chinese artists living in China and abroad.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper investigates the potential of Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book to revitalise readers’ apprehension of place, and human entanglements with the non-human world. It ponders over how Wright calls readers to question ways of being and knowing. Finally, the paper explores how The Swan Book’s complexity and thus its resistance to readers’ perception demands an ethics of reading Indigenous literature.' (Publication abstract)

'The Indigenous Australian author Alexis Wright has developed a novelistic oeuvre that experiments with written forms of fiction, and paints an Aboriginal universe that does not need European epistemology to sustain itself. Rather, it questions western values, certainties, and convictions and problematizes the western way of seeing and doing in the island-continent. Her latest novel, The Swan Book, in manifesting its spiritual and mystical connections to the holistic universe known as the Dreamtime, foregrounds this epistemological turn, which is premised on the ontological relationship Aboriginal people have with “Country,” their traditional land. Alexis Wright’s fiction, which she herself has called an instance of “Aboriginal reality” or “Aboriginal realism,” as opposed to magic realism, is an epic tour de force that juxtaposes the Indigenous and European traditions in startling ways but also speaks across a cultural divide – the discursive gap between colonized and colonizer, belonging and non-belonging, assimilation and sovereignty – which this essay will address.' (Publication abstract)

'Alexis Wright is known for reshaping literary forms to better suit and present an Aboriginal worldview. Her work not only contains an inherently ecological perspective, but is also marked by a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which literature is imbricated with the nation and the economy. This essay traces the connections between Wright’s agitation for sovereignty and social justice, the creation of an Aboriginal economy, and the colonial legacy of climate change. It suggests that Wright’s fiction lays bare the anthropocentric nature of world literature in its current state and tables the prospect of a Gaian world literature.' (Publication abstract)

'Alexis Wright is a Word Carver whose tattoo, in Carpentaria, recalls ancient ancestral spirit journeys. Not since The Bone People took the world by storm and won its Maori author Keri Hulme [Kai Tahu] the coveted Booker Prize, deservedly, has a book of this magnitude appeared from indigenous Australian/Aotearoan authors that could captivate its readers with the power of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. Wright’s first novel, Plains of Promise, was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Let’s hope that Carpentaria wins it, and many more accolades. Alexis Wright is already known as “one of Australia’s finest indigenous writers”. Her work can stand alongside all their best writers.' (Introduction)