AustLit

'Once upon a time, no one worried over the employability of arts and humanities doctorates. Your PhD in English, History, Philosophy, etc likely guaranteed you an academic job in a major, or less well known, tertiary institution. If you didn’t become permanently employed, it meant you were weird (as some of us arts and humanities graduates are). So, while personality might sway the selection panel in terms of suitability to join an existing team, the qualification was rarely disputed. Back then, a small pool of eminently qualified applicants vied for each job. Those days are gone.' (Introduction)

'This paper, as essay, elaborates on Barbara Bolt’s notion of the ‘double articulation’ of practice-led research and its relationship to knowledge, and also draws on the work of Ross Gibson and the insider-outsider view of the artist-researcher; the restlessness of narrative acknowledgement. It builds on ideas of practice, where the primary focus of practice-led research is ‘to advance knowledge about practice, or to advance knowledge within practice’ (Candy & Edmonds 2018: 65). Where this leads is to a definition of a prepositional mode of articulating knowledge through practice, where the relations between are key, the abouts, the withins, the ofs; how the different parts of the process or ‘tissue of making’ (to use Bolt’s term) connect with, interrelate, link, belong, resist. It does this by mapping a series of iterative creative works that have been created and/or made over time through the workings of a specific practice. It traces intersecting lines of thought as a way to explore the processual nature of research; the space of, and value in thinking prepositionally; and the syntax or grammar of creativity.' 

 (Publication abstract)

'While there is a good deal of literature about collaboration and teamwork it is often in disciplines other than literary studies and creative writing. Relatively few writers have reflected explicitly on their collaborative work – and, indeed, writers are frequently characterised as sole creators, valued for their individuality and originality. However, in an environment where collaborative work is being given increased emphasis in the academy, and where there is broad recognition that claims to autonomy by creative artists are doubtful, this paper reflects on its authors’ experience of a writerly collaborative partnership that grew out of a mutual interest in prose poetry and creative practice, and which resulted in a co-authored monograph on prose poetry for Princeton University Press. This collaborative relationship, which began with modest aims, has been characterised by inventiveness and trust and has developed in unexpected ways. It may be understood as an example of what Donna Lee Brien and Tess Brady (2003) call Joint Collaboration, or what Vera John-Steiner (2000) characterises as Integrative Collaboration. However, the authors propose the alternative term, Conjunctive Collaboration, as a way of characterising the new connections and combinations that their collaborative relationship has brought.'  (Publication abstract)

'This article focuses the realist text as a sensory narrative image. I propose that realist fiction, or abstracted realism, is an attempt to capture the incompleteness of human experience through carefully crafted narrative detail – interwoven narrative images. The central premise of this article is that productive engagement with our own writing and the work of fellow writers involves paying close attention to the relationship between sensory narrative detail and a focalising consciousness, as a representation of the ideas that lurk beneath the surface of the text. This analysis occurs within the more specific context of dark subject matter in realist writing. Ideasthesia (from neuroscience) and the unthought known (from psychoanalysis) provide a theoretical frame for a broader examination of the relationship between a focalising consciousness and the transposition of narrative detail. Through this frame, and in relation to examples from long- and short-form fiction, including my own practice, and with reference to William Maxwell, Marcel Proust, Luke Davies, Arnold Zable, Flannery O’Connor, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, as well as Francis Bacon, Charles Baudelaire and Victoria Walsh, this article contemplates the realist text as a sensory narrative image. I track the relationship between form and feeling, both within the narrative world as well as with reference to authorial intention, more broadly.' (Publication abstract)

'With PhDs in creative writing becoming more valued and valuable in both local and international contexts, the question of models that are fit for purpose has never been more pressing. This paper discusses a case study of an approach to PhD pedagogy underway with writers from across the Asia-Pacific. It is a model of advanced practice-led research in creative writing, which helps established and mid-career writers to deepen their oeuvres and careers. The model poses the question: What if a PhD in creative writing focused its site of research on a practitioner’s ongoing practice as a writer? How might this deepen the practitioner’s engagement with the processes of and contexts for writing, and enable shifts in and for their future writing practice? This paper invites educators and writers to reconsider how a PhD by practice in creative writing contributes new knowledge – on literary approaches, forms, genres and cultures – to the discipline, at the same time as it provides a writer with insights to transform their practice. Faculty and student perspectives of a transcultural, multidisciplinary, low-residency program, based in Vietnam and Australia, reveal how this unconventional approach is making a difference to PhD pedagogy and creative practice research.'

 (Publication abstract)

 

'The objective of this article is to define the archetypal features of a television anti-heroine to aid screenwriters with the scripting of their own anti-heroine teleplay. Once this has been accomplished the article will present additional secondary character archetypes which are specific to the storyworld of the television anti-heroine. It will explore how archetypes offer ‘systems of meaning’ (Pryor & Bright 2008: 74), providing audiences a necessary entry point of comprehension. Ultimately the archetypes presented could be utilised to guide screenwriters as they work to circumvent chaos and fragmentation while crafting the journey of their anti-heroine. Much of the literature centred on archetypal paradigms is heavily influenced by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey. While these texts are of some use, they are inherently gender biased in favour of the hero. Therefore the vast majority of archetypes are not entirely compatible with the heroine, let alone an anti-heroine. It should be noted that the outcomes of this paper have emerged from the author’s scripting of an anti-heroine teleplay, alongside case study textual analyses. To ensure the credibility of conclusions drawn, the article will first provide a short synopsis of their teleplay, Angela.'  (Publication abstract)

'Chernobyl occupies a complex space in the Western cultural imagination, complicated by science fiction fantasies, crime thrillers, military-style video games, haunting photo installations, and a recent HBO drama series focusing on the nuclear disaster. While the devastation of the reactor is often regarded as a ‘dark metonym for the fate of the Soviet Union’ (Milne 2017: 95), the nuclear crisis is also at the centre of increasing anxieties about the ‘fate of future generations, species extinction and the damage done to the environment’ (93). Indeed, the enormity of Chernobyl, like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima, is often regarded as beyond representation. By examining a range of poems produced by Chernobylites or derived from witness testimonies, we argue that in confronting the unthinkable, poetry is uniquely able to convey the inexpressible and abject horror of nuclear destruction. Further, in considering the potential for commodification in writing about sites of tragedy, we define poetry about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as an example of ‘dark poetry’ – that is, poetry exploring or attempting to imagine or reanimate examples of dark tourism. We specifically explore this example of dark poetry to contend that while it often lobbies for nuclear international cooperation, it can also be read as exploitative and romanticising the macabre spectacle of nuclear explosion.' (Publication abstract)

'Taking up the embodied erotics of translation put forward by Aarón Lacayo and drawing on Luce Irigaray’s figure of the lips as meeting the other at the threshold of their irreducible becoming, this paper presents the make-out session, or ‘pash’ of translation, as a framework for producing multilingual writing that preserves the messy, multidirectional movement of interlingual translation on the page. Close textual analysis of Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote and Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing! serves to demonstrate that such a mode of translative writing defers textual closure so as to facilitate the emergence of a multiplicity of textual resonances and highlight the asymmetries and discomfort of the interlingual encounter. An accompanying creative text, also published in this edition of TEXT (Fisher 2020), experiments with the application of such multidirectional and ‘suspended’ translation techniques to produce a response to a poem by the Argentinian author Alejandra Pizarnik, moving between Old Provençal, Castellano and English to produce a piece of poetic prose that interrogates the frustration of displaced infatuation, the ethically questionable state of travelling ‘for pleasure’ and the embodied resonances between material discursive bodies in various states of becoming and becoming undone in desire.' (Publication abstract)

Author's note: After the portrait “Katherine Mansfield: Interior” by Anne Estelle Rice