AustLit logo

AustLit

Timothy Steains Timothy Steains i(7531693 works by)
Gender: Male
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 The Mixed Temporalities of Transnationalism in Dreams of Speaking Timothy Steains , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , March vol. 41 no. 1 2017; (p. 32-46) 'This article explores the mixed temporalities inherent in Gail Jones’s treatment of transnational grief in Dreams of Speaking(2006). I examine the novel’s interests in modernity and temporality and show how the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, in the novel, creates grief that is shared across national boundaries. The novel explores the coexistence of the modern and the unmodern, and Jones exemplifies this in the spectral nature of grief; it haunts the two protagonists throughout Dreams of Speaking. This article reads the coexistence of modernity and the unmodern alongside the ways in which Japan unsettles Eurocentric notions of colonial modernity (with its insistence on shared temporalities of progress) by having been a colonial power as well as by undertaking substantial modernisation in the postwar period. I employ Harry Harootunian’s notion of “mixed temporalities” to show the transnational dimensions in the cross-cultural interaction this novel facilitates. I compare the novel’s treatment of the bomb, and of temporality, to Salvador Dalí’sThe Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory(1954) and highlight the transnational sentiments in Jones’s treatments of the tropes of water and resonance.' (Publication abstract)
1 Questions of Uncertainty Timothy Steains , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , May no. 56 2014;
— Review of The Postcolonial Eye : White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race Alison Ravenscroft , 2012 single work criticism
X