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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
Notes
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Dedication: To Prudence, for all those virtues
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Epigraph: Comprises quotes from Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master and Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes.
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No Road comprises nine chapters or sections, which are in turn subdivided into individually titled shorter pieces. The title of each chapter is sometimes (but not always) taken from the title of one of the pieces which appear in that chapter. Some of the chapters that appear in No Road are revised versions of works that were published previously in various journals and anthologies.
Contents
- No Road, single work prose (p. 13-46)
- Two Men, single work prose (p. 49-75)
- Separation, single work prose (p. 77-91)
- Coonardoo 1993, single work prose (p. 93-117)
- Family, single work prose (p. 119-145)
- Provincial Europe, single work prose (p. 147-164)
- All the Women Get Happy Now, extract (p. 153-158)
- Signs of Life, single work prose (p. 167-203)
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Two Texts (and One Other),
single work
prose
(p. 205-217)
Note: With title: 'Drifting Out'
- Australia, for Example, single work prose (p. 219-239)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Also sound recording.
Works about this Work
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Writing into or Drawing from? Self-manifestation through Movement in Contemporary Writing of Space
2017
single work
criticism
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue Website Series , October no. 41 2017;'Contemporary Australian cultural studies has seen a move towards a multimodal awareness of space and place in writing – a speculative turn in both critical and creative work confronting the subject/object dichotomy as a limitation in place-making. Theorists such as Ross Gibson, Stephen Muecke and Michael Farrell offer beautiful conceptualisations of written spaces, drawing from several philosophical traditions, which might give context to contemporary creative practices. This writing regularly draws from movement as an integral feature of the practice discussed, with walking emerging in several approaches to re-envision the poet wanderer. But it is also possible to trace in this writing an act of selfmanifestation, a desire for the ‘doing-making’ of self to be inscribed within the multimodal spaces created. This paper will argue that this layering of self and space in the act of writing is both akin to and actively opposing the tradition of Romantic thought. While several features of the practices invoked might seem to draw from similar acts of immersion in landscape, the underlying trope of the Romantic poet’s divine communion is inverted in the speculative drive towards multimodal relation.
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Wounded Spaces / Geographies of Connectivity : Stephen Muecke's No Road (Bitumen all the Way), Margaret Somerville's Body / Landscae Journals, and Katrina Schlunke's Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre
2014
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Decolonizing the Landscape : Indigenous Cultures in Australia 2014; (p. 149-168)'In this essay, I explore three texts written by white Australians that either attempt to explore Indigenous relationships to land or address the legacies of white settler violence. All of them might be considered as texts of reconciliation growing out of concerns generated by the Bringing Them Home Report (1996) on the separation of mixed-race children from their families and the 199os Decade of Reconciliation.3 All three texts seek new ways of belonging to country and new connections with peoples and landscapes. The narratives include Steven Muecke's No Road (Bitumen All the Way) (1997), Margaret Somerville's Body/Landscape Journals (1999), and Katrina Schlunke's Bluff Rock (2004). These hybrid, provisional texts exceed disciplinary and generic classifications. They self-consciously reflect upon the complex attachments and messy entanglements involved in white settler belonging, challenging what Aileen Moreton—Robinson calls the "possessive logic of white patriarchal sovereignty."5 Weaving together autobiographical material with post-colonial and postmodern theory, ethnography, spatial history, cultural geography, ecological ethics, and decolonizing critique, their narrators speak across cultures, attempting to negotiate a contested ground of knowledges, cosmologies, and modes of being; to forge an ethics of being together.'
Source: pp.150-151
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A Spiral Bridge
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , October vol. 14 no. 2 2010; 'Commencing tertiary students in writing and communications programs often struggle to absorb literary and cultural theory as it is presented in existing texts. Finding alternate strategies for presenting such material might prove productive. One possible alternate strategy evolved from the preparation of the theoretical component of my PhD thesis, during which I realised that I was telling a story not only about the object of analysis (the creative artefact), but also about the very selection and synthesis of theory for my epistemological apparatus. Forming the view that the discursive and experiential composition of a writing subject is central not only to literary practice but also to critical and theoretical practice, I recognised this as one of the defining attributes of a fictocritical approach, which validates exploration, construction and application of literary theory by using the textual strategies, traditions and conventions of literature itself, so that theory might ‘don the clothing’ of literature and ‘walk about in it’, much as an actor does to understand and interpret a character for an audience. Thus writing literary and cultural theory into a narrative might prove useful for commencing tertiary students, who are likely to be familiar with literary strategies and conventions.' (Author's abstract) -
Landscape and Australian Fiction
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory 2010; (p. 41-49) 'Susan Martin's essay... considers the central role played in Australian literature and its criticism by ideas about the land and environment, from colonial images of conquering or domesticating the land, to the heroic or anti-heroic ideas of nation-forming bush, to the increasing sense of an Aboriginal land, to new postcolonial forms of spatial history and contemporary eco-criticism.' Source: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory (2010) -
Becoming Postcolonial : Getting Lost For a While With Stephen Muecke's 'No Road' and Remaking Australia
2008
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Fact and Fiction : Readings in Australian Literature 2008; (p. 353-367)
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No Rehearsal (Writing All the Way)
1997
single work
review
— Appears in: Continuum : Journal of Media and Cultural Studies , vol. 11 no. 2 1997; (p. 146-149)
— Review of No Road : (Bitumen all the Way) 1997 selected work prose extract -
Different Truths Excite the Mind
1997
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 10-11 May 1997; (p. rev 8)
— Review of The Book of Lonely 1997 single work novel ; No Road : (Bitumen all the Way) 1997 selected work prose extract -
Australia in Brief
1997
single work
review
— Appears in: The Times Literary Supplement , 3 October no. 4931 1997; (p. 30)
— Review of No Road : (Bitumen all the Way) 1997 selected work prose extract'Stephen Muecke’s No Road (bitumen all the way) is an ambitious work that blends travel, ethnography and cultural theory. Using the Aboriginal nexus between space, story and wandering (an area Bruce Chatwin explored in The Songlines), Muecke heads into the vast area of north-western Australia to document a personal journey, with no particular destination. He writes about this region and its Aboriginal communities without resorting to representing both landscape and people as a picturesque other (Chatwin’s weakness, according to Muecke, is his European, imperial aesthetic sense): “Communities lie on the tracks and byways of experience (the No Road of his title), not on the national highways of myth and ideology (the bitumen).” Muecke, in the tradition of Deleuze, conceives of writing as an endless journey, always keeping ideas…' (Introduction)
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On the Road Again
1997
single work
review
— Appears in: Meanjin , vol. 56 no. 3-4 1997; (p. 486-494)
— Review of No Road : (Bitumen all the Way) 1997 selected work prose extract -
The Music of Travel
1997
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , June no. 191 1997; (p. 33-34)
— Review of No Road : (Bitumen all the Way) 1997 selected work prose extract -
A Poetics of Failure Is No Bad Thing : Stephen Muecke and Margaret Somerville's White Writing
2002
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , no. 75 2002; (p. 17-26, notes 176-178) -
The Identity of the Author? : Aboriginal Places Confront White Writers
1998
single work
essay
— Appears in: Arena Magazine , April/May no. 34 1998; (p. 18-19) In this essay Rosaleen Love compares her experience of and writing about a place and a person with the same place and person in one of Stephen Muecke's prose pieces in his No Road : (Bitumen All the Way). Love's short story written about her experience follows the essay. -
The Magic of the Body
2001
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Rethinking Creative Processes 2001; (p. 39-48) -
Becoming Postcolonial : Getting Lost For a While With Stephen Muecke's 'No Road' and Remaking Australia
2008
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Fact and Fiction : Readings in Australian Literature 2008; (p. 353-367) -
Landscape and Australian Fiction
2010
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory 2010; (p. 41-49) 'Susan Martin's essay... considers the central role played in Australian literature and its criticism by ideas about the land and environment, from colonial images of conquering or domesticating the land, to the heroic or anti-heroic ideas of nation-forming bush, to the increasing sense of an Aboriginal land, to new postcolonial forms of spatial history and contemporary eco-criticism.' Source: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory (2010)
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