AustLit

'The poet John Forbes (1950-1998) was famous for his erudition, but it is a feature of his work that has long been overlooked. Outlining how knowledge functions in Forbes’ poetics and compositional process, I argue for foregrounding this knowledge content in readings of his work, before modelling sustained readings of the erudition of two of Forbes’ best-known poems, ‘Stalin’s Holidays’ and ‘Ars Poetica’. These readings focus on the experience of contingent difficulty – that category of difficulty, according to George Steiner, that finds its source in a reader’s lack of knowledge – and the role that research, or ‘homework’ (26), plays in the reading process. While acknowledging that Steiner’s contingent difficulties are intertwined with – and sometimes created by – other categories of difficulty, this article argues for the productiveness of such ‘homework’ early in the interpretative process. Steiner likens contingent difficulties to ‘burrs on the fabric of the text’ (27). I extend this metaphor to propose that contingent difficulties, in their tactile, grip-like quality, enable a reader to engage with a difficult poem, and to proceed with exegesis, when the difficulties the poem otherwise presents seem insurmountable.' (Publication abstract)

'This article details how Carrie Tiffany’s 2005 novel, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living poses a series of significant challenges to both non-Indigenous Australian belonging and the teleology of the settler-colonial farm novel. I argue that Tiffany provides a conceptual space for thinking the history of Australia differently, while responding to the farm novel that emerged with different traditions in Australasia, North America and southern Africa in the first half of the 20th century (Hughes-d’Aeth 207). Specifically, I examine how Tiffany deploys agricultural catastrophes to destabilise the ideology of progress as a technology for claiming land under the dictum of proper use, consequently bringing the justifications for colonial domination into contest.' (Publication abstract)

'Popular analyses of gendered violence focus on the need for an individually-focussed approach to the problem which calls for greater responsibility and accountability for individual men. Men who use violence are often viewed as bad apples; or as deviant to the moral codes which are necessary in a moral society. But contemporary Australian authors examine the socio-cultural, political and economic structures that promulgate inequality according to gender, class, age and culture. This inequality manifests in the gendered violence which Christos Tsiolkas, Richard Flanagan, Charlotte Wood, Zoe Morrison and Sofie Laguna portray as a product of neo-liberalism. The men within their fiction are affected by disconnection and individualism within our neo-liberal, patriarchal society. The male protagonists are subjects of, as well as producers of dominant practices of masculinity. Equally, their female characters are not merely passive victims of gendered power as they protest against and challenge the structures that support inequality. Through post-structural analyses which leaves room for contradiction and nuance within characters, these contemporary Australian authors are able to maintain hope for difference and redemption in the lives of men who use violence and abuse, and the women and children who are affected. They consciously avoid separating people in to categories of good or evil, or just and unjust, given that these dichotomies are central to the patriarchal and capitalistic systems of individuality and competition which they critique.' (Publication abstract) 

'Reading Dorothy Hewett's Bobbin Up (1959) with the tools provided by recent advances in social reproduction theory, this essay suggests that Hewett's text develops a richer and more sophisticated account of the relations between waged and unwaged labour than previous materialist critics have acknowledged. In turn, it reads Bobbin Up for the ways Hewett's fiction can provide insights for social reproduction theorists. Hewett's novel, this essay argues, builds a specifically social-reproduction poetics.' (Publication abstract)

 (Introduction)

'By performing a feminist textual analysis of these two autobiographies, I examine the nature of the intersections between the putative liberations for women afforded by punk and post-punk music, and autobiography as a textual performance of the self. In addition, a reading of these autobiographies enables me to address questions of national context. I argue that, in an echo of Julian Temple’s ferocious documentary of the Sex Pistols, The Filth and the Fury, the characteristically punk thematics of filth and fury enable these autobiographies to narrate the narrators’ rejection of, and consequent sense of monstrosity in relation to, conventional Australian femininity and the rock industry. Filth, in terms of abject and excessive elements, personae, and processes characterising the punk self, and fury, as this subject’s central type of affect, are means to articulate the making and unmaking of the female musician’s self as monstrous. Analogous to their stage work, Amphlett’s and Horne’s textual selves recruit and exploit a typically masculine set of codes to perform a novel subject of music: the female post-punk singer. Both Amphlett and Horne thereby write in a fraught space—an industry just starting to admit women in less conventional terms—to write a liminal self: one partly created by myths—some self-created, others externally imposed.'

'Western mythology traditionally offered sparse, negative readings of things related to earth, as a prison-like entity guarded by the god Hades (Cirlot, Grillet). This paper traces motifs of dirt and soil in several early poems by James McAuley (1917-76). “Envoi” (1938), an inland landscape from McAuley’s stay in Bungendore, rural NSW, attributes to the “soil, the season and the shifting airs” the “faint sterility that disheartens and derides.” Similarly, “The Tomb of Heracles” (1947-49) reiterates motifs of aridity and sterility in imagery of dry landscape: “Blind light, dry rock, a tree that does not bear.” Nonetheless, a differentiation occurs in “Envoi,” in introducing the motif of suppressed fertility and “good chance” in the “artesian heart,” in which earth is reluctantly recognised as the eventual, vital water bearer.

'This paper traces the important formative influence of T.S. Eliot, notably “The Waste Land” and Australia’s own agency of modernism the Jindyworobak movement, with its original environmental manifesto (1937) and celebration of Australia’s dry interiors and indigenous values. It traces other, desolate encounters with earth in McAuley’s war-time reading of early Portuguese chronicles of voyage reflected in his explorer poem “Henry the Navigator” (1944)— “These roots of stunted bushes scrabble earth/Like withered birds […].” The poem adverts to later European “discovery” of Australia’s reportedly arid coasts. 

'The paper also identifies the return to a more accepting reading of motifs of dry earth-scapes “Harsh, dry, abrasive, spikey, rough” in  McAuley’s later poems depicting the Coles Bay nature reserve in eastern Tasmania: “By no stretch [..] a locus amoenus” (Bush Scene”, 1974).'  (Publication abstract)

'John Schumann's song 'I was only Nineteen' contains the line 'The Anzac Legend didn't mention Mud,' which might be reasonably read as the dirt music of Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. This article argues that Leonard Mann's 1932 novel Flesh in Armour is both an exception and indicative novel of Australian wartime experiences on the Western Front. Contaminated mud features as a persistent metaphor of abjection. Yet the sacralised beach and rocky outcrops of Gallipoli and the desert sands of the Middle East had the effect of obscuring the filth and tragedy of war in the trenches and across no-man's land. The article compares E P F Lynch's Somme Mud and Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune with Flesh in Armour and speculates on influences emanating from Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.'  (Publication abstract)

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