AustLit

'We teach English at university. Our weekly engagements include navigating unnerving plot twists, falling in and out of love with iconic characters, and evaluating the complexities of language and genre.' (Introduction)

'I was four years old and it felt wrong that my father should see himself as evil. Although his moods and formality frightened me, I had plans at that time to marry someone just like him, a tall Dutchman with fair hair and blue eyes would could speak several languages, build houses and drive a motor bike (6).' (Introduction)

‘What’s that smell?’

'My seven-year-old keeps asking this, from her middle-seat in the back of the inevitable family four-wheel-drive. No one knows what the smell is, or will admit to owning it. I like to think of it as the intangible odour of youth – a mixture of sweat, anxiety and optimism – it smells like ‘what’s next?’, ‘are we there yet?’, or ‘has anyone got phone coverage yet?’ It is, more practically, the scent of clothes that haven’t been washed recently, of food still uneaten from hours ago, of perfumes and colognes that haven’t yet been grown into. It’s also the scent of us – our family – the smells that mingle and collectively characterise our present while reminding us of our past, and hint of our future.' (Introduction) 

'Enabled by the speed and ease of mobile technologies, and by the ubiquity of camera phone photography, first-person and visual forms of travel narration have become a significant mode of travel writing in the twenty-first century. Such narratives offer an almost limitless (albeit fragile) archive of travel information with a very broad reach. Numerous practices, including simple photo sharing or photo diaries or the serialised “selfie”, locate and show the author-self moving, locating, living, and playing in everyday and extraordinary spaces. This essay argues that “the selfie” is a new mode of travel narrative practice that deserves further attention in terms of how it functions within the travel writing genre. In our analysis, we return to long-standing debates over conventional definitions of “tourist” and “traveller” (Thompson 2011; Youngs 2013) and we engage in post-colonial and trauma scholarship as well as theories of life writing to discuss the ANZAC Cove selfie as it illuminates some of the complex issues and contexts that surround and characterise the selfie as travel writing.' (Publication abstract)

'In this article, I ‘trouble’ mainstream moral panics about children’s social media use. Respondents were invited to complete a survey that asks them to reflect on their use of Instagram as a form of diary-keeping. At a time when there is much negativity around young people’s use of social media, I explore how Instagram might be used by young people as a mode of cultural participation. This case study promotes a more nuanced understanding of young people’s everyday life storying and communication practices, and their relationships to certain publics or anticipated readers.' (Publication abstract)

'Life writing such as autobiography, biography and memoir continues to be popular with readers while new genres, for instance, on-line or in other public, performative iterations, also shift and grow. Both historically and in the current moment, life writing emerges to address issues of individual experience in relation to public record. Very often, such works also seek to engage with issues of justice or redress, particularly in relation to expressions of trauma or conflict. What role do life narrative texts play in troubled times? This special issue presents scholarly and creative work that seek sot respond to this question in particular. The writing and research here explores troubling subjects such as political injustice, moral panics, and family and interpersonal relationships. These works ‘trouble’ prevalent ideas, for instance about minority or marginal cultures to offer new ways of seeing the cultural work that diverse life narrative texts can perform.'  (Publication abstract)

'These chapters gathered from two special issues of the journal Life Writing take up a major theme of recent work in the Humanities: Trauma. Autobiography has had a major role to play in this ‘age of trauma’, and these essays turn to diverse contexts that have received little attention to date: partition narratives in India, Cambodian and Iranian rap, refugee letters from Nauru, graffiti in Tanzania, and the silent spaces of trauma in Chile and Guantanamo. The contexts and media of these autobiographical trauma texts are diverse, yet they are linked by attention to questions of who gets to speak/write/inscribe autobiographically and how and where and why, and how can silences in the wake of traumatic experiences be read. These essays deliberately set out to establish some new fields for research in trauma studies by reaching out to a broader global context, into various texts, media and artifacts, representing diverse histories with specific attention to different voices, bodies, memories and subjectivities. This collection addresses the contemporary circuits of trauma story, and the media and icons and narratives that carry trauma story to political effect and emotional affect.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Douglas and Barnett discuss their experiences teaching life writings of trauma to undergraduate literature students, employing Helen Garner's Joe Cinque's Consolation as a case study. They consider the affect of trauma stories and explore the ethics of including trauma texts in the literature curriculum–texts that often confront and destabilize students' reading positions. Such texts require the deployment of literary methodologies including, but also beyond, close reading–for instance, paratextual, contextual, and theory-based readings. Life narratives of trauma offer a means for broad considerations of the social and political efficacy of Australian literature texts.' (Publication summary)

'The 2011 reality television series Go Back to Where You Came From used established narrative modes of stunt memoir, testimony, and conversion to start a public conversation about Australia’s recent treatment of asylum seekers. This essay explores both the cultural possibilities and the pitfalls of the series’ textually-hybrid approach.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.