AustLit

In their editorial, Webb and Krauth discuss the contents of the issue and the Public Lending Right Committee Annual Report 2006-07 and its series of appendices which list the top 100 books in various categories

Author's abstract: This essay intervenes in current debates about the operation of creative writing as an academic discipline, and provides a polemical critique of practice-led research as a basis for disciplinary identity. It argues that the emergence of creative writing studies as a field of academic research is the product of an ongoing tension created by the pull of centrifugal intellectual forces that are interdisciplinary in focus and centripetal institutional forces that are driving towards disciplinary independence.

Authors' abstract: Recently a number of conferences and exhibitions have focused on the relationship between creative practice and human rights, and writers, visual and performance artists and others have protested human rights abuses and/or made work that specifically responds to current problems. But what is art capable of doing in the face of global political events, economic problems and socio-cultural catastrophes - and what is its responsibility? This paper discusses some ideas that emerge from the literature, and also some trends in Australian publishing after September 11.

Authors' abstract: Writing therapy usefully creates, or makes explicit, common ground between literature and medicine, arts and sciences, and between clinical and community sectors and the academy. It draws upon multiple theories of language, memory, pain, subjectivity, identity, creativity, and the unconscious and is a site at which the concerns of established and emerging disciplines and interest groups coalesce; for example, literary studies, psychoanalysis, narrative therapy, narrative medicine, trauma studies, human rights, life-writing, and testimony studies. This article maps the field to indicate the breadth and potential of writing therapy as well as its risks and difficulties, and also suggests ways in which the practice and theory of therapeutic writing relates to and might be compatible with the practice and theory of creative and life-writing. Research suggests that writing may be most beneficial to health if it moves through developmental stages typical of writing designed for a readership. Transformation in the writing over time is relevant to both literary and health assessments. The article concludes that writing therapy presents a fascinating challenge for the discipline of creative writing and that there is potential for university writer-teachers to investigate writing therapy in academic, health science and community settings.

Authors' abstract: Peer review is a central tenet in research across all disciplines. It is a key feature in monitoring the advance of knowledge, especially in academic publishing. This article investigates the development of peer review from the seventeenth century to the present, and analyses significant aspects of the process. It also attempts to clarify some criticisms and make suggestions about the role of peer review in the current climate.

'... This paper explores the political, ethical and personal issues of researching / writing Holocaust fiction for young people ...'

Author's abstract: '... Special-interest magazines are potentially an area of employment for graduates of creative and professional writing programs, a subject of instruction for writing teachers and an object of study for researchers in the discipline; however, there is little scholarship that sheds light on the generic characteristics, production processes and industry contexts of Australian special-interest magazines. This article draws attention to this gap in scholarship and uses it as an example of a field of study that, while traditionally considered the domain of other disciplines, can be positioned within creative and professional writing to enrich teaching programs in the discipline.

Author's abstract: Non-Indigenous Australian authors representing Indigeneity in their work need to address a number of issues, including the fundamental question of whether to do so. Having incorporated representations of Indigeneity in a children's novel written as part of my PhD thesis, I traced the origins and evolution of my representational practices in the novel through the other component of the thesis, a multi-genre exegesis. The processes of writing both components raised a range of issues, including questions of motivation; my right, responsibility and competence to represent; and the strategies employed in both components to address some of these questions. In this paper I reflect on these issues, and conclude that my efforts have been unavoidably far from perfect, yet worthwhile as a stage in ongoing negotiations of meaning and power between non-Indigenous and Indigenous cultures in Australia, and that non-Indigenous writers like myself need to be conscious that our efforts are never, and can never be, purely benevolent and/or selfless.