AustLit
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Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
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Also includes panel 4-6 of the 6 Ages of Women, by Emily Sun in collaboration with artist C. Jupp.
Contents
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Traumatic Cosmopolitanism : Eleanor Dark and the World at War,
single work
criticism
(p. 7-17)'This essay argues that women writers working during and prior to the Second World War produced works which might be identified as examples of "traumatic cosmopolitanism"-that is, a cosmopolitanism forged through the shared experience of trauma. In narrativising their shared, global traumatic experience, and in particular, the experience of being a writer during this time, wartime women writers effectively construct a community of (thinking about and writing about) suffering which moves beyond the national discourses of jingoism and ignorance that can perpetuate trauma and violence. With a focus on Eleanor Dark's wartime novel The Little Company (1945), this essay suggests that Australian women writers of the Second World War are at the vanguard of such ethical projects for the ways they challenge the lapse into nationalist dichotomous discourses of war, and considers the dual sense of psychological threat and the ethical responsibility of the writer which is figured in such works.' (Publication abstract)
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"A Meaningful Freedom" : Women, Work and the Promise of Modernity in a Reading of the Letters of Raden Adjeng Kartini (java) Alongside Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career (Australia),
single work
criticism
(p. 18-36)'Raden Adjeng Kartini (1879-1904) and Stella Miles Franklin (1879-1954) were contemporaries. They were born in 1879-Kartini in Java in what was then the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and Miles Franklin in the Monaro region of New South Wales, Australia. They did not share a common language-I doubt they ever even heard of each other-but at the end of the nineteenth century they both blazed a path of resistance against the expectations of their respective societies that they would marry, have a family, and live lives dependent upon a husband. Although just twentyone at the turn of the century, both dreamed of a career and the social and economic freedom to make meaningful life choices on their own terms. Both saw leaving their homelands as offering the possibility of making their dreams a reality.' (Publication abstract)
- Scrubbing Vegetables at the Sink in Shanghai Winteri"This could have been my grandmother’s last house,", single work poetry (p. 37)
- September Cracks Like a Yolki"When my mother loses her mother,", single work poetry (p. 37-38)
- Staying in Dadaji’s House on His First Death Anniversaryi"Astro Boy plays on the TV as the rickshaw man rides by,", single work poetry (p. 38)
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Narratives of the “Not-So-Good Nurse” : Rewriting Nursing’s Virtue Script,
single work
criticism
(p. 79-97)'The prolonged commemoration of the ANZAC centenary has flooded popular culture with images of the self-sacrificing, ever-reliable, ablycompetent and often feisty, forthright, female nurse. This notion of ‘the good nurse” is prevalent and promulgates what Nelson and Gordon (in The Complexities of Care: Nursing Reconsidered, New York, 2006) term a “virtue script” for, and about, nurses. Following this scripting, nurses portray themselves, and are portrayed, as angelic, sweet, kind carers. This positive feedback loop, ironically, traps nursing and nurses (who are still predominantly women) into a continual one-dimensional, unrealistic and de-humanised portrayal. Nurses are undermined and silenced when only one aspect of their identity is understood. There are, however, other representations of nursing, which offer important counter-points to the “good nurse” which, when examined closely, can yield a more nuanced, albeit sometimes shockingly gritty, realistic reading. Re/reading recent auto/biographies of nurses to move beyond the virtue script reveals how a more nuanced, cosmopolitan reading of these nurses and their profession can promote a clearer understanding of how contemporary nursing identity can be understood, characterised and developed.' (Publication abstract)
- Why Do We Close the Door On Domestic Violence?, single work prose (p. 98-100)
- Self Portraiti"There is a woman lying dead", single work poetry (p. 100)
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A Fragmented Life : Writing Intergenerational Trauma in Morgan Yasbincek's 'Liv',
single work
criticism
(p. 101-115)
'In this article I engage trauma theory to analyse the narrative strategies that Morgan Yasbincek deploys in the novel 'liv' (2000). I demonstrate how Yasbincek makes the expression of creative emergence from catastrophically fracturing intergenerational trauma significant as a theme and a process and how the text makes this imaginatively and effectively available to the reader. I analyse the representation in 'liv' of the paradox inherent in the traumatic shattering of subjectivity and the ensuing reconstruction of identity facilitated through creative writing, where the imperative to create enables an oblique access to the foreclosed traumatic experience.
''liv' is a fictionalised account of a family's Croatian-Australian migration and, although it was short-listed for the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 2000, and commended by the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards of the same year, critical analysis of the work has to date been limited. The narrative is enacted through a heteroglossia that is foregrounded through the use of stylistic fragments that perform the temporality of the intergenerational and traumatic memory and dis-continuity. 'liv' shows how intergenerational trauma manifests and has its effect attenuated as emergent subjectivity forms through creative endeavour.' (Publication abstract)
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In the Land of Mer,
single work
prose
(p. 129-133)'She is home now, in the depth of murky green water, no longer holding on to the belief that she will transcend her own inability to be human and walk as one who has an eternity. This is a story of not being seen, of not being heard and of another other. She is home in the perfect symmetry of fire, water, earth and air believing that the skin she sheds is one she no longer needs but will grieve for anyway. She knows her magic is strong, family will always support her but her life is not one of the simplicity of being loved by another other that in time would cancel out all that is negative in her and hold her back. She sheds a skin to reveal the ancient hide of strength and beauty so coveted by myth. Sacrifices will be made because in shedding she will lose that which had been offered to her as an ephemeral promise leading her to only know what she could have had, not what will be. The elements will move for her as places of empathy and manipulation and what she loved will stay forever in the world she could never have. It will be a harsher yet more merciful way to be.' (Publication abstract)
- Wild Daughtersi"Has she really stopped", single work poetry (p. 134)
- The Crowi"Is this your country spirit", single work poetry (p. 134-145)
- The Handcuffsi"She sits across from me, at the", single work poetry (p. 135)
- A Woman's Placei"For a century", single work poetry (p. 137-138)
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Playing against Type : Approaches to Genre in the Work of Helen Garner and Kate Jennings,
single work
criticism
(p. 139-155)
'This paper examines the autobiographical fiction of Australian authors Helen Garner and Kate Jennings and shows how these texts engage with and disrupt notions of genre. The texts examined are Garner's Monkey Grip (1977) and The Spare Room (2008); and Kate Jennings' Moral Hazard (2002) and the anthology of essays and short stories, Trouble: Evolution of a Radical/Selected Writings 1970-2010, which the author has described as her "stand-in for memoir."
'Monkey Grip, The Spare Room and Moral Hazard are marketed as novels, but draw significantly on actual events, blurring the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. With these texts, Jennings and Garner contest assumptions about what the novel as genre is and can be. Garner in particular has been criticised for having the impudence to describe her autobiographical fictions as novels, with some critics dismissing these works as little more than transcribed and edited diaries.
'Drawing upon the ideas of genre theorists including Mikhail Bakhtin, Benedetto Croce and John Frow, this paper proposes a more liberal definition of the novel. These theorists assert that the novel is a dependent genre, a fusion of genres rather than a genre in its own right. Following Frow and Bakhtin, I argue that the malleability of the novel is precisely what makes the form so suited to the boundary-blurring writings of Garner and Jennings. This paper also examines what the authors themselves have to say about genre and the power it exerts over how their works are read, critiqued and received. It draws on the work of feminist critics including Mary Eagleton, Joy Hooton, and Cinthia Gannett, to show how the work of Garner and Jennings sits in the traditions of diaries (or journals) and autobiography, and how a discussion of genre is inevitably tied to that of gender.' (Publication abstract)
- About That Flag, single work essay (p. 166-170)
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March of Little Magazines,
single work
essay
(p. 171-175)'The counter culture days bred many myths. Charles Simic recently recalled "the biggest and most illustrious gathering" of poets, a conference in the United States in 1968 ending in a grand fisticuffs between warring factions (Simic "The Great Poets' Brawl," n.p.). (Publication abstract)
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Angeliki,
single work
prose
(p. 176-179)'In my family there were eight of us. My brother George died when he was mauled by a wild boar as he slept in his crib on the verandah. Katerina died when she got sick with the flu and was too weak from poverty to fight it. My father was starved and worked to death as a prisoner of war by people he once recognised as friends and neighbours. That left five of us. My mother, my eldest brother Kyri, myself, my sister Georgina named after our dead brother and the youngest Angeliki.' (Publication abstract)
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Matrilineal Narratives : Learning from Voices and Objects,
single work
criticism
(p. 180-190)The matrilineal line is a precious connection although it is sometimes disrupted and marked by absence. In this paper we explore notions of generational connections and loss among women in our families. Three women scholars from a regional university, we are interested in the agency of objects, as discussed by Eva Domanska in 2005, and their role in feminist research. In particular we consider the entanglements between matrilineal voice and objects that produce possibilities for care and nurturing across generations. Through our conversations, we discovered that our grandmothers' and great-grandmothers' stories shared threads of similarity. We tell these stories through the collective biography of poems and prose leveraged from significant objects that highlight the "generational nurturing," researched by Nye. We disclose our attempts to reconstruct and reconnect with the women of our matrilineal lines across decades. We embed new layers in our retelling of old stories to our daughters and nieces.' (Publication abstract)
