AustLit

'In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva writes about lost children. These are what she calls 'dejects', who, in the psychodrama of subject formation, fail to fully absent the body of the mother, to accept the Law of the Father and the Symbolic, and subsequently to establish 'clear boundaries which constitute the object-world for normal subjects'. Dejects are 'strays' looking for a place to belong, a place that is bound up with the Imaginary mother of the pre-Oedipal period. Kristeva's sketch of the deject as one who is unable to negotiate a proper path to the Symbolic is useful to a reading of Hartnett's Of a Boy (2002), a novel that also deals with lost children and imaginary mothers. However, in its portrayal of children who are doomed never to achieve adulthood, Of a Boy enacts a haunting retrieval of the pre-Oedipal from the dark side of phallocentric representation, privileging the semiotic (Kristeva's concept) and the maternal as necessary disruptive checks on a patriarchal Symbolic Order. In reading the narrative in this way, this essay does not seek to foreclose on other interpretations which may more fully illuminate the material and historical contexts in which Hartnett's stories of abandoned and lost mothers and children are activated. Rather, by examining the text using an aspect of psychoanalytic literary criticism, this essay acknowledges the centrality of the psycho-social to Hartnett's delineation of the child subject in her narrative projects.' (Author's abstract)

'Deborah Jordan relates some of her experiences in writing a a book, and subsequently self-publishing it, about her mother's life as a writer. Writing Mothers/Writing Daughters is a theme explored in different contexts, and in different genres. One thinks of Dursilla Modjeska's Poppy or of the biography of Edna Ryan by her equally acclaimed daughter. Jordan addresses the making of There's a Woman in the House, A 1950s Journey, which is a self publishing venture to celebrate the life and work of her own mother, through her own voice, with a collection of her own writings as a freelance journalist in the 1950s. It addresses, some of the issues that arose in the process of re-discovery and publication and some of the ideologies and options of genre. (Publisher's abstract, xviii)