AustLit

Colonial dynamics can exist between fields of research, and in the most problematic cases, a discipline will appropriate the knowledges of another soley on its own terms, distorting meanings in the process. Interestingly, a similar problem exists in the domain of information management, in which computers struggle to automatically transfer 'objective' facts between contexts that actually represent subjective abstractions of reality. In 2004, the authors of this article - a fiction writer and a systems architect - began collaborating with a team of computer scientists to design a knowledge representation system that could track changes in contextual meaning. Our task was to use insights from the arts in system design, without losing the strengths of each field's forms. As the project grew, we discovered how much work and reward is involved in Gayatri Spivak's suggestion regarding collaborative story-building: there is something I want to give you, which will make our shared practice flourish. [Authors' abstract]

'This article analyses the Australian film Ten Canoes (2006), which was co-directed by non-Indigenous director Rolf de Heer and Indigenous director Peter Djigirr. The essay forgrounds the relationship between the 'I' of the Indigenous narrator and the 'you' of a mainstream non-Indigenous audience that must read the English subtitles while viewing the visual text, which brings the viewing experience closer to that of engaging with a long poem. The narrator encourages an affective response from the viewer by inviting the viewer/reader to 'see' the story and therefore to 'know' it. This combination of corporeal and mental engagement with the text brings the reading strategy close to what Gayatri Spivak calls 'critical intimacy', a strategy that we argue is an appropriate - and indeed ethical - way for non-Indigenous (and perhaps non-Yolgnu) viewers to respond to this film, which is the first Indigenous language film to be produced in Australia.' [Authors' abstract]

A double click on the 'Take Action' button opens up several ways of collaborating with Amnesty International that include the classic letter writing to authorities, joining a local group, leaving a gift in your will and throwing a fundraising party, amongst others. The degree of commitment shown by Sarah, a member of the Urgent Action Network in Janette Turner Hospital's short story 'Dear Amnesty', acquire hyperbolic tinges when whe manages to save Rosita - arrested and tortured for requesting better work conditions - by draining off her pain into her own body. This article engages with Turner Hospital's short story as an extreme example of the main tenet of Levinas's ethics of alterity: our infinite responsibility for our neighbours. Like Amnesty International, Levinas's ethical philosophy envisages a messianic time free from political violence. Sarah's radical openness to the other can also be analysed in the light of Gibson's ethics of affect. Inspired by Levinas and his other-centred philosophy, Gibson elaborates an ethics that priviledges sensibility, vulnerability, generosity and self-expenditure over and above self-interest and restraint. [Author's abstract]

In this essay I argue that Thesis II (that 'Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice') from Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, might be read as a cogent theory of poetry, and that the 'proof' of a line of poetry lies in the reader's uptake of it. In support of this claim, I give examples from the critical practice of Robert Hass as having particular resonance with the thesis; and move on to give examples of the reality and power of poetry (or its lack) through my own critical readings of poems by Emily Dickinson and Australian poets, John Kinsella and Jennifer Harrison. [Author's abstract]