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'Contemporary Australian cultural studies has seen a move towards a multimodal awareness of space and place in writing – a speculative turn in both critical and creative work confronting the subject/object dichotomy as a limitation in place-making. Theorists such as Ross Gibson, Stephen Muecke and Michael Farrell offer beautiful conceptualisations of written spaces, drawing from several philosophical traditions, which might give context to contemporary creative practices. This writing regularly draws from movement as an integral feature of the practice discussed, with walking emerging in several approaches to re-envision the poet wanderer. But it is also possible to trace in this writing an act of selfmanifestation, a desire for the ‘doing-making’ of self to be inscribed within the multimodal spaces created. This paper will argue that this layering of self and space in the act of writing is both akin to and actively opposing the tradition of Romantic thought. While several features of the practices invoked might seem to draw from similar acts of immersion in landscape, the underlying trope of the Romantic poet’s divine communion is inverted in the speculative drive towards multimodal relation.
Notes
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Epigraph: I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills… (Wordsworth 1807:49)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
- Seven Versions of an Australian Badland 2002 single work prose
- 26 Views of the Starburst World : William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788-91 2012 single work biography
- No Road : (Bitumen all the Way) 1997 selected work prose extract
- Textual Spaces : Aboriginality and Cultural Studies 1992 selected work criticism
- South Australia,