AustLit
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Contents
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The Art in Fiction : Thomas Keneally,
single work
criticism
(p. 280–292)
'The article picks up references to novelist Thomas Keneally’s interest in painting and tracks his uses of artists and painting in selected fiction. Visual art supplies style and thematic depth to Bring Larks and Heroes, is integral to the complexity underpinning the murder-mystery of A Victim of the Aurora, allows narrative perspective and structural coherence in Confederates, and connects with elements in The Daughters of Mars that echo the novelist’s positioning of his work across both Europe and Australia, and between commercial and literary fiction.' (Publication abstract)
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Flaunting Dissonance : The Queering of Narrative and Gender Boundaries in Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story,
single work
criticism
(p. 391–408)
'The Twyborn Affair (1979) is generally regarded as Patrick White’s covert “coming out” novel, followed by his frank “confession” in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). However, this article explores how even an earlier work such as The Aunt’s Story (1977/1948), from the Nobel laureate’s modernist phase, may be seen as a pre-text for the gay self, whereby the author stages incomplete representations of his own subaltern position in the characters he “becomes” in his writing. Through a series of textual feints, his persona is disseminated in the form of polyvalent alternative selves which belie any possibility for recuperation of a stable, authentic selfhood. White thereby refuses the univocal inscription of subjectivity upon which sexual hegemony is predicated. What I aim to do in this article is to extend the particularities of the novel’s writing strategies (found in the Jardin Exotique section, for example, which functions as a Foucauldian heterotopic space) into the province of gender. In doing so, I will show how the gay author, through the central character, Theodora Goodman’s protean identities and the deployment of competing narrative epistemologies, can fabricate alternative subject positions. These attest not only to the artificial technologies of gender constitution, but also function as remnants of White’s own divided status, brought about by his dissonant subaltern position in the borderlands of representation.' (Publication abstract)
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Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture : British Worlds, Southern Latitudes and Hemispheric Methods,
single work
criticism
(p. 409-426)'Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the nineteenth-century literary cultures of the southern settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa from within an interconnected frame of analysis. First, because of their distinctive historical and structural conditions; second, because of the density of their interregional networks and relations across intersecting oceanic spaces; and third, because of the long history of racialized imperialist imaginaries of the south. This methodological position rethinks current approaches to “British world” studies in two important ways: first, by decoupling the southern settler colonies from studies of settler colonialism in North America; and second, by rebalancing its metropolitan and northern locus by considering south-south networks and relations across a complex of southern islands, oceans, and continents. Without suggesting either that imperial intercultural exchanges with Britain are unimportant or that there is a culturally homogenous body of pan-southern writing, we argue that nineteenth-century literary culture from colonial Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — what we call a “southern archive” — can provide a counterbalance to northern biases and provide new purchase on nation-centred literary paradigms — one that reveals not just south-south transnational exchanges and structural homologies between southern genres, themes, and forms, but also allows us to acknowledge the important challenges to foundational accounts of national literary canons initiated by southern theory and Indigenous studies scholars.' (Publication abstract)
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World Literature, the Opaque Archive, and the Untranslatable: J. M. Coetzee and Some Others,
single work
criticism
(p. 480–497)
'A key concern of recent theoretical orientations in the development of “World Literature” as a discipline has been the question of accessibility to literatures in minor languages, which is to say of literal and metaphorical translatability, even transparency. This essay explores the challenge posed by the occlusion of the possible intertextual influence of works in such languages that are evident only as a trace in texts that now seem indisputably part of a canon of World Literature. What happens when the engagement of writers in this canon with cultural production in languages adjacent to those in which they themselves principally operate is not evident to an increasingly global community of scholars, and perhaps not even evidenced in an author’s archive (whether this is understood to be a material collection or indeed a virtual space conceptualized as the literary ecosystem in which an author has developed)? This essay addresses these questions with reference to the work of South African-born Nobel Prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee, and to the problem posed by some of his work’s (and his archive’s) others, here specifically Afrikaners and the work of Afrikaans-language writers. This consideration has implications not only for the current shape of Coetzee studies, but for that of World Literature more broadly, presenting something of a limit-case for the translation metaphor that directs some of its formulations as disciplinary field.' (Publication abstract)
