AustLit

The author investigates 'how texts written by women writers based in Melbourne’s inner north can latently serve as counter narratives to this discourse, demonstrating how urban public space can be benign, even joyful, rather than foreboding for women. Cultural narratives that promote the vulnerability of women oppress urban freedoms; this paper will use these narratives solely as a catalyst to explore literary texts by women that enact contrary narratives that map a city not by vicarious trauma, but instead by the rich complexity of women’s lives in their twenties and thirties.'

The paper examines 'two memoirs set primarily in Melbourne’s inner north: Michele Lee’s Banana Girl (2013) and Lorelai Vashti’s Dress, Memory: A memoir of my twenties in dresses (2014). In these texts, the inner north serves as ‘true north’, a magnetic destination for this stage of life, an opening into an experiential, exciting adult world, rather than a place haunted. Indeed, while Lee and Vashti occupy the same geographical space that Meagher did, these texts do not speak to the crime.'

Source: Author's introduction.

'Mobilizing Jacques Derrida's concept of the "trace" and Funder's reference to trains in the text, we position Funder as a moving vessel, traversing geographies (both physical and psychological) as she seeks to contain memory. Since the initial publication of Stasiland in 2002, it has attracted a great deal of praise and aroused some controversy. Funder tells the story of East Germans affected by the Ministry for State Security, commonly known as the Stasi (an acronym for the German Staatssicherheit), effectively the "secret police" wing of the GDR government, an organization whose name has become shorthand for an insidious, totalitarian form of surveillance and punishment (Grieder xvii ). Funder speaks with the harassed and the harassers, years after the reunification of Germany, immersing herself within the narrative, creating a work that is equally about the lives of Germans as it is about Funder's experience: her day-to-day life in the country researching the text and her writing process. Brison suggests in her work that when "trauma narratives" are "witnessed," or listened to, they become "speech acts of memory," which work as "re-making the self' (39). [...]these fictions that have previously been destructive to one's psyche can be reworked and effectively reclaimed:'  (Publication abstract)