AustLit

'In thinking about the relationship between poetry and the extreme, we wanted to examine how poetry functions in a number of ways: how it creates the space – and new forms of language – to articulate events which seem inexpressible; how poets innovate to enact resistance; how poetry helps to break silences and taboos; and how poetry, and the role of the poets, is so often linked to the transgression of boundaries. The submissions we received embraced the notion of extremity in a variety of ways, considering the mathematical complexities of the work of Louis Zukofsky, for instance, and the desire for liberation in the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik, whose life, Caio Yurgel writes, might be understood as “a long preparation for suicide”. We received work on provocative ideas about nationalism and resistance, politics and disaster, about collaboration through the extremities of climate change and COVID, and how women poets might “disrupt and disturb” patriarchal systems to construct new visions of autobiographical memory, as Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton examine. The poetic responses also echo these themes, often eerily, focussing on abject bodies and the taboo, on autobiographical memories, on places overwhelmed by the devastations of extreme weather events, and on the “phenomena of perception” as a reaction to the alienating nature of pandemic ‘normal’. Importantly, the responses, both scholarly and creative, demonstrate the centrality of poetry to the difficult, wrestling with questions about selfhood and belonging, for example, as well as with language itself, its contortions and transformations in seeking to find new shapes for the ineffable.' (Alyson Miller and Ellie Gardner : Editorial)

digital technologies do more than mark the surfaces of contemporary print novels. They also put into play dynamics that interrogate and reconfigure the relations between authors and readers, humans and intelligent machines, code and language… More than a mode of material production (although it is that), digitality has become the textual condition of the twenty-first-century literature. (p. 186) (Publication abstract)

(Publication abstract)

'‘Biofiction’ is a relatively new term for a long established literary practice - centring a new work of fiction around a real person from the past. Recent years have seen enormous growth in the publication of such works, with a related surge in critical interest. There is a significant and growing body of scholarship that evaluates the relationship between the real and imagined in biographical fictions, and the works’ social impacts. Generally, these studies have had a British, European or North American focus. Our aim with this special issue is to draw attention to some of the creative works and critical developments in the Australia and New Zealand region, especially those less covered by existing scholarship.' (Kelly Gardiner Catherine Padmore, Editorial introduction)

'This special issue of TEXT had its origins in a three-day symposium on Creative Collaborations in Intercultural and Intermedial Spaces, at La Trobe University, 7-9 July 2020.' 

'This special issue includes traditional articles and creative works that explore the fission between the arena of the mind and the concrete, tangible things of the world around us.'  (Publication abstract)

'Poetry, it seems to me, raises the questions of margins and marginality in obvious ways … and yet poetry is central in terms of its contribution to language and thought. (Hecq 2005)

'Liminality indicates a border, a line, and thus some style of crisis – some turn, or act of turning, of crossing from one place or state to another (Meads 2019: 5). It is the discovery of a limit, and simultaneously, realisation that the limit is not the end. There is always some further into and through which to step. What seems a wall is a skin is an interstice is warping, stretching, porous. Like the ‘/’ in the ‘im/possible’ and ‘both/and’, such lines are zones, spaces, gaps for opening and unfolding, sites for play and experimentation, for testing, dreaming, discovering. The liminal is thus imbued with potential: hitherto-unthought thoughts become articulable, letting new knowledges and ways of knowing come to be (Meads 2019: 5-6).' (Jaydeep Sarangi and Amelia Walker, (Introduction)

'Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public. (Morrison 1993)

'These lines, drawn from novelist, essayist, and teacher Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel lecture, offer a vivid description of the kinds of rhetoric dominating our public, professional, and even our cultural spaces today, although the cracks are beginning to show, and we would be hard pressed to claim that ‘harmony’ prevails.' (Deborah Hunn, Ffion Murphy, Catherine Noske and Anne Surma, Introduction)

'This special issue of TEXT explores issues related to identity, politics and creative writing from the perspective of creative writers and creative writing academics. The question of who can speak and what stories can be told is central to any discussion of contemporary writing and writers, and to the literary industry including publishing, reviewing, awards and education.' (Natalie Kon-yu and Enza Gandolfo : Introduction)

'This special issue is interested in the language possibilities inherent to this reframing and proposes that there are multiple languages or frames through which we can envisage and understand possible futures. It presents expert knowledge alongside creative expression to stimulate a range of dialogical possibilities that expert and creative expression, on their own, cannot achieve. We, the editors, argue that any engagement with our present, in the light of the future, calls upon an anticipatory aesthetic (Bussey 2017a, 2017b) in which the imagination is a key producer of foresight, hope and a range of possibilities.' (Marcus Bussey, Lisa Chandler, Gary Crew, and Rachel Robertson : Introduction)

'As we were proofreading this introduction, the new(ish) Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, responded to the warnings of a special report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by defending the Australian coal industry (Hannam & Latimer 2018). In reference to the Green Climate Fund, set up by the nations that make up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in support of developing nations responding to climate change, Morrison added, ‘Nor are we bound to go and tip money into that big climate fund. We’re not going to do that either. I’m not going to spend money on global climate conferences and all that nonsense’ (Karp 2018).' (Patrick Allington, Piri Eddy and Melanie Pryor : Introduction)

'This special issue brings together a diverse collection of studies that show the different ways that contemporary life narrative practices and texts seek to trouble the genres of life narrative – expanding the genres’ boundaries and unveiling new possibilities for the form, or showing the ranges of ways that life narrative texts and practices trouble socio-political or cultural contexts, representations and conditions.' (Kylie Cardell, Kate Douglas and Donna Lee Brien : Life narrative in troubled times)