AustLit

'This chapter explores “constellational form” in Gerald Murnane. It argues that the key continuity in Murnane’s work lies in his associative way of writing, and analyzes the motivations and philosophical convictions underlying this form. It traces these formal continuities across Murnanes work, from his early novel Tamarisk Row (1974) through to his post-hiatus fictions up to Border Districts (2017). It also considers Murnanes “idealism” and probes how this underpins his unique understanding of the ontology of characterological beings and the relationship between implied author and reader.' (Publication abstract)

'In the middle of a Sydney winter at the turn of the century, Alain Badiou scrawled a message in a copy of Being and Event (1988): ‘For Melissa, in friendship, and in memory of a very dense and very happy trip to Sydney’. The book didn’t exist yet in English; its author was virtually unknown outside of France. At the time—in the late 1990s—only a handful of Badiou’s works were available in English, the most notable being a critical commentary on Gilles Deleuze translated by the Australian philosopher Louise Burchill. So, what had brought Badiou to Sydney? Most immediately, it was Oliver Feltham. Feltham was a young Australian philosopher who had come back from Paris with a plan to bring Badiou to Australia. He contacted the Sydney-based philosopher Melissa McMahon, who helped arrange for Badiou to speak at the 1999 Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy’s ‘To Be Done with Judgement’ conference. There Badiou delivered a paper on ‘The Part and the Whole’ and, on the conference’s final night, launched the English translation of Manifesto for Philosophy (1991). The launch, at Gleebooks, was poorly attended: a few diffident graduate students and academics milled about the bookshelves. A photograph from the event shows Badiou towering (he is very tall) and affectless, arms crossed, besides John Bacon, a logician from Sydney.' (Introduction)

i just want plumbing, art

Gareth Morgan, ‘the national debt’.

I hate work so / That I have found a way

Lesbia Harford, ‘I hate work so’.

'Lionel Fogarty occupies a curious place in Australia letters. Widely regarded as the most important Aboriginal poet of his generation and even, as John Kinsella declares, ‘the greatest living Australian poet’, he has nevertheless received relatively little attention from scholars and is published by small, independent presses. Where considered at all, his politically charged, singular poetry is often treated with baffled awe or else conceived as a method of resisting the coloniser through an idiosyncratically ‘creolised’ English. This paper returns to various critical attempts to think Fogarty’s poetry, from ‘deep reading’ to ‘re-reading’ – some of which, like the trope of ‘unsettlement’, have yielded influential hermeneutics for the reading of Australian poetry per se – and treats these past readings as an entry point for an analysis of the complex rhetorical and poetic games of address in Fogarty’s poetics. It considers, in turn, the poetic importance of Fogarty’s sustained commitment to internationalist, liberationist, and anti-colonial politics, which it conceives as a poetics of solidarity.' (Publication abstract)