AustLit
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Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake : Remembering a Post War Australian Childhood and an American Chocolate Cake,
single work
criticism
(p. 240-249)
'Stories are very important in order to understand who we are and where we have come from … Many stories can make us nostalgic for the food of our childhood or for some other happy time. (Alexander 1988, vii)
‘Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake’ is a distinctively Australian story that fits into a subgenre of food memoir. The food memoir is an established and important subgenre of the memoir, with American writer M.F.K Fisher described as its mother (Waxman 2008, 364). Food memoir is traditionally seen as ‘modest and incomplete in comparison to the monumental, self promoting autobiography’ (Pettinger 2008, 135). Reflections on childhood are frequent in memoirs – childhood occupies a central position in the emerging notion of ‘self’ (Protschky 2009, 373) – and in food memoir, the story frequently traces the author's passage from child to adult and their discovery of a passion for food (Fulton 1999; Alexander 2012; Wood 2012).' (Author's introduction)
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Embracing Disgrace : Writing from the Dark Side,
single work
criticism
(p. 250-260)'J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace has been hailed as the greatest novel of the last 25 years written in English, and a novel with which it is almost impossible to find fault. Disgrace is a palimpsest of intertextual woven strands, and in Coetzee's words, is dialogic in that it awakens the countervoices in oneself and embarks upon speech with them. Studying this novel can therefore teach us much about writing the counter voices of our own lives with honesty, courage and skill. In this paper, I demonstrate how Disgrace can be taught in Creative Writing programmes not only as a literary text but as an exemplar for narrative craft and technical innovation which will give our writing gravitas and resonance.' (Publication abstract)
