AustLit

'This article deals with the politics of observing and commenting on "elsewhere" in John Mateer's "Portuguese collection" of poetry, Southern Barbarians (2011), with particular recourse to Marc Augé's anthropological theories of places and non-places. It also attempts to establish connections between Mateer's perceptions of Portugal and questions related to a Portuguese national identity as formulated by contemporary cultural commentators (Eduardo Lourenço, José Gil, Boaventura de Sousa Santos). In doing so, an exploration of the relationship between Portugal and Australia becomes inevitable.' (Author's abstract)

'The proliferation of trauma fiction has given rise to a debate about the ethical challenges of representing and responding to trauma. An abuse of this theoretical framework may lead to an unethical appropriation of the trauma of others. The main aim in this article is to study Gail Jones's use of poetic indirection in her short story "Touching Tiananmen" (2000). This strategy raises awareness about the historical trauma of the Tiananmen massacre, and takes how its victims may be represented into consideration. Firstly, the ambivalent meaning and relevance of silence in the short story will be explained. This discussion is supported by a detailed analysis of the formal and stylistic strategies used in Jones's narrative to evoke the 1989 traumatic event. Secondly, the story's construction of temporal, place and positional forms of circumspection will be examined. Finally, Homi Bhabha's notion of "now knowledge" will be used to comment on the story's anti-climatic turning-points and ending. By way of conclusion, it will be argued that Jones's choice to "speak shadows" proves to be a powerful strategy to denounce forgetfulness and call for our recognition of responsibility towards the victims.' (Author's abstract)

'This paper examines the critical reception of Alexis Wright's Plains of Promise as a piece of magical realism, and suggests that it should be read as something of a preparatory text for Wright's later and more highly acclaimed work, Carpentaria.' (Author's abstract)

'How can the fictional representation of space and domestic interority be interpreted in fictional works like Dirt Music, The Riders or Winton's latest novel Breath? This article argues that the house as an active living space in Winton's work functions significantly in the context of describing a mythical, commercially marketable, nostalgic image of rural Australia as a place of masculine redefinition and maturation. The analysis of spatiality in this context provides a deeper engagement with the connection between space and gender, highlighting the ambiguous nature of specifically gendered spheres in the architecture of Winton's fictional dwelling places. Deviating from the original Victorian concept of "separate spheres", which set up clear definitions of male and female domestic spaces, Winton's narratives place priority on highlighting the male influence on the originally female domains in the house. It is argued that these spaces reflect the troubling binary between male presence and female absence, highlighting the desires and troubles of the male characters but also female trauma, self-harm and displacement. These are some of the issues this paper addresses, showing how the postcolonial dialectic between place, space and gender can be applied to Winton's fictional "traumascapes" (M. Tumarkin).' (Author's abstract)

'This article articulates a psychoanalytic reading of Christos Tsiolkas's Dead Europe by analysing desire in relation to Melanie Klein's oral sadistic stage, a desire which, in the author's grim fairytale with Gothic-laden aesthetics, is metaphorically expressed through vampirism and cannibalism.' (Author's abstract)

'This article deals with two ethnic hoaxes - O'Grady's They're A Weird Mob and Demidenko's The Hand that Signed the Paper - examining their reception in the Australian literary market through the lens of Freud's theory of the comic and the joke. Focusing on etymological implications of the comic and the joke, their respective containing and rupturing effects and how these interlink colonial, assimilationist and multicultural discourses in Australia will be pointed out. Apart from revisiting the social and literary backgrounds of the novels this will cast light on their similar perpetuation of binary oppositions which de-aestheticise the inferior "other" in favour of the superior "White" subject. On the other hand, the comic-joke relationship will be useful in order to interpret the psychoanalytical reasons for the diametrically opposite reception the novels received after the hoaxes were unveiled. This reception was due not merely to the different content of the novels but also to the locus of the comic. In They're a Weird Mob the comic is embedded inside the text, thus containing the rupturing effect of the joke, which reveals the mimicral relationship between the two subjects of the above binary opposition and, thus, the post-colonial/post-multicultural "similarity" between them, even after the hoax was revealed. However, in Demidenko's case the locus of the comic is to be found in its epitextual elements which meant that, once the hoax was discovered, the joke with its psychoanalytical meanings and fears haunted the "White" subject in the open, rupturing such a subject's putative superiority. It is with the latter meaning that the neologism "hoaks" is used in this article; that is, to sum up the idea that ethnic hoaxes play on the slippery psychoanalytical ground of the comic and the joke, of superiority and its opposite, uncanny fears.' (Author's abstract)