AustLit

'This essay will examine the role of the unconscious drive in the impulse to write the lyric poem, particularly contemporary lyric verse, in the 'universe of quanta' when meaning and certainty are deemed indeterminate. This impulse or urge to write will be treated as the key part of the central stage in the three-stage process of composition, which will be described, noting its differences and similarities to Paul Valéry's notion of this process. It should be made clear from the outset that this study is concerned with the psychology of composition of lyric verse, and not with the science of objective evaluation of poetry. It will be argued that the unconscious drive in the impulse to write is sourced through 'unintention,' during a 'poetic state,' or 'hyperconsciousness,' (stage II) that is driven by the poet's deep-rooted, subterranean personal forces, in concert with and subsequent to the intention or vocation or preparedness to write poems (stage I). Key to this examination is what I call the 'poet-paradox': the notion that the self is not only what the lyric poet needs to discover and represent, but that it can be most vividly and truly represented only when the poet is not 'present,' during the peculiar focus of the 'hyperconscious,' when the poet is least self-conscious. It will be useful to establish just what it is that lyric poetry expresses, in general terms, and why it is that the difficulty or peculiarity of this expression generally necessitates 'hyperconsciousness.'' (Author's abstract)

'In J. M. Coetzee's 2003 book Elizabeth Costello, the title character's son watches as she gives a painful radio interview, and thinks: 'A writer, not a thinker. Writers and thinkers: chalk and cheese. No, not chalk and cheese: fish and fowl. But which is she, the fish or the fowl? Which is her medium: water or air?' Coetzee's Costello books challenge the common divide between writing and thinking and raise various questions around the traditional elevation of reason above embodiment in contemporary scholarship. This paper takes the 'late style' of J. M. Coetzee's 2003 book Elizabeth Costello and 2005 book Slow Man and uses them as a lens through which to reread his previous books, both novels and criticism, while exploring Coetzee's preoccupation with the act of writing and the position of the writer. It also addresses the ethical questions surrounding fictional embodiment: Why embody another? what good does it do? could it, in fact, do harm? and in what terms are we to describe the relationship between author and character? In this paper I posit the language of analogy and metaphor, of figures of speech, as neither 'human weaknesses,' as philosophers like Thomas Nagel and Peter Singer may see them, nor as 'contagions,' but as sites of clarification, equivalent in many ways to the uneasy ethical lines between writer and written.' (Author's abstract)