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Taking account of the impact of new social networking technologies, Philip Mead begs the question of how 'literary versions of human collectivity' might now be understood in a world where [c]onnectivity is rapidly evolving in a posthuman world, replacing community'. In suggestive readings of the two recent works with strong local focuses - Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance (2010) and John Kinsella's Divine Comedy: Journeys through Regional Geography (2008) - Mead models a critical practice that overrides Casanovas's binarisms by attending to the multiple possibilities of time, space, identity and collectivity that these textual spaces bring into being. AS he writes: 'Communities are dimensional in the way space is: they exist in time, in historical incarnation, but also in the existential constellations of individual consciousness. Multiple and virtual, they are always expanding and shifting.' (Kirkpatrick, Peter and Dixon, Robert: Introduction
xvi)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Last amended 1 Feb 2013 12:40:20
136-155
Connectivity, Community and the Question of Literary Universality : Reading Kim Scott's Chronotope and John Kinsella's Commedia