AustLit

'Graphic storytellers make complex ideas easy to understand. Their technical and interpretive skills help to illustrate abstract concepts and transcend language barriers. So, we’ve commissioned Graphic Storytellers at Work: Cross-industry opportunities for cartoonists, illustrators and comics-makers, a new report which explores how the skills of cartoonists, illustrators and comics-makers are being applied. This happens across a diverse range of industries such as health and education.

'Artists surveyed described using their skills to communicate important health information to culturally diverse communities, translate complex legal documents, or create tools and resources for psychologists and surgeons.

'The report provides a fascinating portrait of the professional lives of Australia’s cartoonists, illustrators and comic-makers and highlights the huge potential for the cross-industry application of their skills. It was led by comics-makers and comics researchers Dr. Pat Grant (Lecturer, School of Design, UTS) and Mr. Gabriel Clark (Lecturer, School of Design, UTS), along with Dr. Elizabeth MacFarlane (University of Melbourne) and Dr. Ronnie Scott (RMIT University). All four are active within the Australian graphic storytelling community and are based in either Melbourne or Sydney.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This paper investigates approaches to authorship in The Long Weekend in Alice Springs (2013), a graphic adaptation by the Australian artist Joshua Santospirito of a psychoanalytic essay by Craig San Roque (2004). Because the subject of both essay and adapted text is the ability of stories to have lasting effects over time in a space of crisis, this unusual adaptation establishes itself as an unusual site of authorship, whereby multiple authorships create a complicated authority, and stories themselves are shown to be significant. Through its variable positioning of the different roles undertaken by the author, the adaptation struggles with the ongoing challenge of appropriating Indigenous storytelling and suggests a possible way to discuss these stories from the outside. Through analysing paratextual materials and the work itself, this paper shows how nonfiction comics can both convey stories and separate themselves from stories through destabilising notions of creation and authorship.' (Publication abstract)

'We are three writers and researchers learning to teach the image. We approach comics from different backgrounds and engage the medium in different ways, but our point of convergence is Graphic Narratives, a fourth-year subject developed by Dr Elizabeth MacFarlane at the University of Melbourne. Liz founded Graphic Narratives in 2011, when it was Australia’s first tertiary-level subject devoted to the study of the comics medium. Each year students create a minicomic which they then have the opportunity to swap or sell at an annual showcase event open to the public. With graphic novelist and academic Dr Pat Grant, Liz co-directs the Comic Art Workshop, Australia’s first artists’ residency dedicated to supporting major comics projects in progress. Bernard Caleo has taught comics making skills as part of Graphic Narratives, and also at primary and secondary schools. He edited and published the giant romance comics anthology Tango from 1997 to 2009, and made the feature documentary Graphic Novels! Melbourne! in 2012 with filmmaker Daniel Hayward. His ongoing project is to investigate possibilities for performing comics. Dr Ronnie Scott guest lectured, then tutored, then coordinated Graphic Narratives in various years and has since integrated comics into his Media & Communication Honours Lab and his undergraduate Nonfiction studios in the Creative Writing program at RMIT University. He has also published comics criticism in national venues and edited comics for international literary magazines, as well as publishing scholarly research on comics.'  (Introduction)

'Just as J. M. Coetzee’s post-2003 books present essays and narrative alongside one another, this book engages with its ideas through both critical and creative writing. Reading Coetzee interleaves critical essays on Coetzee’s works with an autobiographical narrative detailing MacFarlane’s more personal response to her reading and writing. The presentation of elements of the creative with the critical, and the critical within the creative, aims to challenge the traditional boundary between the two. This kind of methodology derives from the idea (and practice) of embodiment: that an idea or philosophy does not ‘float free’, but is tied to the idiosyncrasies, divergences, and subjective ‘travel’ of its speaker or writer.

'Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and Diary of a Bad Year explicitly address themes which abide more surreptitiously throughout his oeuvre: the divisions and paradoxes which occur the moment pen gains page, the value of literature, and the ethics of embodiment. In revealing the dialogue between writer-self and reader-self, and between author and character, these recent novels invite a rereading of Coetzee’s previous literature. Reading Coetzee explores Coetzee’s preoccupation with the act of writing using his recent books as a lens through which to view his eight previous novels as well as his memoirs and essays.' (Publication summary)

'This paper engages with the postscript of JM Coetzee's 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello with the intention of introducing the concept that Coetzee's late works act as 'postscripts' to his previous body of writing. It proposes that every act of writing, as particularly demonstrated in the suspended poetics of metaphor and analogy, is an act of sacrifice, as evinced by Lady Chandos in Coetzee's Postscript: 'Always it is not what I say, but something else!' (Coetzee 2003: 228). The paper observes the deficiency of language, the writer's attempt nonetheless, and the inevitable resultant ruptures in text and self. The article pursues these ideas through both critical and creative writing. ' (Author's abstract)

'In the final "lesson" of Coetzee's 2003 novel, Elizabeth Costello, the title character is faced with a courtroom straight out of Kafka. She must here confront her identity as a writer and provide what is ultimately a performance of belief. My discussion uses Kafka's precedent story "Before the Law" and Derrida's essay of the same name to enquire into what, for Coetzee, are the questions surrounding the author on the stand about the difference between the event or practice of literature and the Law of literature. And further: how does an author reconcile of embody both timelessness and transience when the pen hits the page? Coetzee has created a specific character with strangely universal motives; the discussion addresses the kinds of divides this engenders on the page and in the reader.' ( Source: Elizabeth MacFarlane)