AustLit

'Published less than a year apart, Meera Atkinson’s two new books make a profound and original contribution to the study of trauma in the humanities and creative writing practice, as well as the wider public conversation about its rippling effects upon lives and across generations. Traumata (UQP 2018) and The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma (Bloomsbury 2017) are very different works, one a creative non-fiction account of growing up and living with trauma and the other an academic inquiry into the literary poetics of trauma transmitted from one generation to another. Yet the two books traverse similar terrain in search of answers to similar questions: how does trauma move from one body to another and across time? How is it shaped and changed by the actions of living, the structures of oppression within which it operates and the slow, arduous efforts of survivors to recover? How might language bring forth that most resistant of experiences, the traumatic?'  (Introduction)

'Despite public awareness of their role, speechwriters occupy an anxiously liminal position within the political process. As the ongoing dispute between former Australian prime minister Paul Keating and Don Watson over the Redfern Speech suggests, the authorship and ownership of speeches can be a fraught proposition, no matter the professional codes. Crafting and re-crafting identity places speechwriter and speechmaker in a relation of intense intimacy, one in which neither party may be comfortable and from which both may well emerge changed. Having written speeches for Jack Layton, former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, I know just how complex, uncertain and productive that relation can be. This article conceives of identity as transindividual, formed in the intensity and flux of encounter, and weaves together the personal and the critical to examine politics’ speechwriting ghost.' (Publication abstract)

'At the heart of literary theories of trauma is the trope of aporia: the unrepresentable, unknowable event that enters into literary language through its fracturing, its falling short of meaning-making (Caruth 1996, Felman and Laub 1992). Yet this aporia is more than collapse of meaning into paradox: it is a site of affective intensity. While this traumatic affect can arrive through language, it also emerges in the resonance of blank space – in writing that embraces absences of text. Tracing these resonances of the negative across two multimodal texts, this paper shows how the material limits of printed words and their relation to empty space evoke traumatic affect. Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition (2015) by Crofton Black and Edmund Clark uses the resonance between documentary evidence, short essays and photographs of emptied sites and spaces to testify to torture and rendition. Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) by Claudia Rankine deploys poetry, layout and artistic images to reimagine the traumas of Blackness in America. Together, these readings show how writing can use negative space as a site of resonance between forms, transforming the limits of written text into new zones for giving life to traumatic affects and granting new nuance to the capacity of literary theory to account for trauma.' (Publication abstract)