Wednesday Canberra weather: regardless of any thing Neil Finn may have said, you don’t really have your own personal weather bubble. You can easily test this by travelling from the Woden Valley to the northside on foggy morning. Or getting on a plane in December and flying to Helsinki.
So those of you who are in Canberra today will probably experience much the same weather as each other. Warm to hot and slighty sticky. The weather equivalent of spilling cocoa on your new trousers.
Chemical interventions such as deodorant, sunscreen, mosquito repellent and anti-histamines are strongly indicated. Consider long before you commit to opaque tights, however hairy your legs are. Once the sun is over the yard arm, applications of gin and tonic may be beneficial.
Advocates have used stories of suffering and survival to bring about change in policy and practice to confront violations of law and human rights. There is an essential, accompanying requirement that the telling must not constitute theft. Identities must be protected. Ownership must be respected. But undoubtedly, sharing stories ensures awareness of the humanity behind what legal and theoretical debates. The personal can influence the policy. Stories are powerful instruments for change. This writer sets out to show how that might be done.
There has been a change in international norms regarding rape in war. After centuries of acceptance that rape in war was inevitable there is now recognition of it as a deliberate tactic of war. There has been accompanying rejection and international response. The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda – and the international criminal tribunals set up to deal with crimes in those arenas were instrumental in establishing tactical rape as a serious breach of international law, a war crime, an instrument of genocide and torture.
In the United Nations, in the courts, in the public media and in academic debate, stories of victims and survivors played a part in effecting attitudinal change. Stories of indifference on the part of authorities were highlighted. The strength as well as the suffering of victims and survivors was told.
Using these stories brings great responsibility – to avoid sensationalism, to protect and respect the owners of those stories. Used with respect they are powerful and can make a positive difference.
This paper examines the legacy of Romanticism on Australian settlement. It investigates how a public hungry for writing of all genres and schooled for centuries by the adventure tales of white heroes—“free”, as Patrick Brantlinger notes, “of the complexities of relations with white women”—came to believe in the authority of the theft of Aboriginal land, and to so casually disregard the violation of her people.
Through close analysis of an account by the Victorian settler, Joseph Tice Gellibrand, this work seeks to unveil how word and action often belie one another, acting to legitimate what was in fact unlawful through what Foucault refers to as a “hazardous play of dominations”.
Furthermore, I examine how the perception of legitimacy continues to operate in the contemporary Australian milieu, seeking to make clear through anecdotal evidence the connections between ideologies past and present, and to demonstrate how in this country (more perhaps than any other), the written word has everything to do with property, and ownership, and authority.
In this way I conclude that it is through the written word, first and foremost, that we can help to bring about social change: through writing that seeks, as Jen Webb states, “to make things visible”, to “provide a platform” from which to disrupt the cultural orthodoxy and the phenomenology of colonialism and thus unsettle notions of settlement and sovereignty.
My work draws on Tim Fulford, Martin Green, Peter Kitson and Saree Makdisi’s explorations of British Romanticism; on the post-colonial discourse of Bill Ashcroft, Clare Bradford, Paul Carter and Stephen Muecke, and on Michel Serres exposition of the sensate realm of experience and the history of the Australian state of Victoria in an attempt to bring into being alternate narratives of place.
Karen Gibson: Re-Reading Jeannie Gunn and Laura Ingalls Wilder: Racism, Myth-Building, and Reader Identification in Two “Pioneering” Narratives
Two books, both initially aimed primarily at juvenile audiences, have enjoyed immense popularity in their own countries of origin and around the world. Yet, in recent years, both have received mixed reviews from critics regarding their portrayals of indigenous people. Both authors reflect back on an earlier period of their own lives with nostalgia, a nostalgia that becomes entangled with early twentieth century myths of nation building and “settling” of “unoccupied” territories, resulting in often unfavorable representations of indigenous communities. Despite these disparate readings by critics, both books continue to be used in educational settings and are often prominently displayed on library shelves.
Drawing on post-colonial theories of children’s literature, this comparison of The Little Black Princess of the Never-Never (Australia; 1905) and Little House on the Prairie (U.S.A.; 1935) will focus on the books’ similarities, and the underlying messages they convey to young readers, in an attempt to understand their enduring popularity as well as to evaluate their potential value for a new generation of readers.
Rosemary Sayer: Identity theft: The missing narrative identity of refugees and asylum seekers in Australia
More than 65 million people have been forcibly displaced worldwide; the highest number since the end of WWII. In his book Across the seas – Australia’s response to refugees: a history (2015) Klaus Neumann describes the response to refugees and asylum seekers as “one of the twenty first century’s most controversial and seemingly intractable ethical, political and social issues …” Much of the public discourse about refugees and asylum seekers in Australia is de-humanising, negative and politicised. Governments and media have often created untrue narratives by grouping all asylum seekers and refugees together and exploiting people’s anxieties about security, borders and terrorism. This has resulted in a theft of identity for many individual people from a refugee background and the development of a misleading collective identity.
In this paper, I will explore how narrative identity can be re-discovered and developed by refugees through a collaborative process of working with a non-refugee narrator. In producing an alternative narrative and different view of the lives affected, I will also explore whether greater community engagement can be fostered at the same time as expanding the scholarship of education and human rights. As Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith posit in Human Rights and Narrated Lives (2004) “personal narratives expand audiences around the globe to be educated about human rights abuses”. Life stories can engage and influence readers to become more informed, reflective and active. I will discuss how this collaboration can be empowering for refugees to help them reclaim their stolen identities and dispel misleading narratives being disseminated about them.
Creativity is often still Romantically conceived and valued in terms of its purity and originality. However, this paper argues that theft – or revisionism – has been a fundamental methodology of creative practice from ancient times through to the digital age. Creativity is visionary only insofar as it is revisionary, and this is because, as common sense confirms, it always emerges from within a cultural domain. The first section of this paper outlines a revisionary theory of creative praxis that contests the Romantic concept of the auto-intoxicated creative practitioner. Following the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I advance a theory of revisionary creativity grounded in the ‘field of cultural production.’ The second part of the paper explores how literary revisionism manifests itself as a central methodology of creative practice in the digital era. The paper concludes with a brief study of an interactive digital narrative project that draws attention to theft or revisionism as its central methodology. We Tell Stories is a collaborative venture between Penguin Books in the UK and the digital games developer Six-to-Start, which consists of a series of six interactive digital narratives, each one of which revises a literary genre or classic story. In line with David Jay Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s theory of remediation, this project of theft or appropriation illustrates the revisionary interplay and competition between different media in the cultural field. Certainly the revisionary methodologies of We Tell Stories, as this paper argues, are inextricable from a transitional publishing economy in which the digital both threatens conventional literary publishing and embodies its commercial future.
Rhett Davis: Author/Developer, Reader/Player: games in experimental fiction and experimental fiction in gamesIn the twentieth century many writers experimented with the form of the novel, from the Modernists James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; to the Oulipo group of Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino and Georges Perec; to contemporary writers such as Jennifer Egan, Mark Z. Danielewski and Robert Coover. Despite their attempts the overall shape of fiction narrative has not been significantly altered in the popular consciousness. Meanwhile, an entirely new and extremely popular medium for narrative has emerged in recent decades—that present in interactive digital entertainment, or video games—and its writers and developers are grappling with many of the experimental narrative techniques previously attempted by many fiction writers. In this paper I compare the works of B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style to the games Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and The Stanley Parable, and argue that there are significant parallels in their use of randomness and narrative repetition and revision. I conclude that significant narrative experimentation is now being played out in the minds of many game writers and designers around the world, and suggest that a popular revolution in narrative form anticipated by writers such as Queneau and Johnson might not take place in the novel at all, but in games.
Brooke Maggs: The Writer Between: Thieving Literary Plot to Design Game NarrativeThis paper will trace my creative process as I move from writer of traditional literature to digital literature. This proposes a number of challenges for the traditional writer moving into game writing. They must understand the reader is a player with motivations related to gameplay (solving puzzles, achievement, progression). Narrative can provide a context (a game world) and incentive (reward) for gameplay, but challenge is to communicate the motivations of the characters within the story to the player. These challenges are tied to the ability of the writer to communicate the story to the development team and work with them to articulate it in the game.
Facing these challenges meant shifting to a design approach to storytelling as a narrative designer. An approach with a revisionist methodology: thieving the voyage and return plot structure and retelling it with a game narrative toolbox. This analysis of my writing practice shows that literary theft was crucial for considering the wider possibilities of interactivity that move beyond read-response theoretical understandings (Iser 1976) of how the reader constructs their understanding of the text. Given a game is an ergodic text, the player will construct the meaning of the narrative in this way and also construct their game experience. I argue writing for games requires the author to also imagine the reader’s and the player’s interactions, and this paper investigates the implications of this on the creative writing process.
‘Frequency illusion’ describes a situation where an individual encounters something seemingly new, and thereafter, encounters it everywhere (Zwicky 2006, p.1). This reflection on creative writing practice-based research discusses how identifying elements in filmic Gothic texts similar to my narrative led to questioning my creativity. Expressing what occurs within one’s mind during the writing process may assist in exploring cognitive approaches to creative writing research (Frieman 2014, p.127).
Inspired by research on Victorian science and the occult, my Gothic serial fiction-in-progress merges elements of sorcery with biomedical experimentation. While writing, I noticed many of my story elements in contemporary Gothic media such as The Walking Dead (2010-2016), True Blood (2008-2014) and The Knick (2014-2016). I began to doubt the originality of my narrative choices and avoided Gothic texts for fear of encountering more of my ‘original’ ideas. I diverted my attention to Fantasy fiction and was soon confronted by giant arachnids.
Fantasy writers appear to have no misgivings about embracing the Fantasy trope of the oversize spider, which dates back two thousand years to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2004). The originality of each spider lies in each writer’s unique approach to its animation, be the beast be made of ice (Martin 1996), have legs like steel blades (Rothfuss 2007), have an aggressive nature (Tolkien 1954) or demonstrate mercy (Rowling 1998). These writers have inspired me to embrace the tropes of my genre and strive for originality in their reanimation. As I endeavor to renege on the narcissistic illusion that the world mirrors my creative ideas (Kirwan-Taylor 2009), I acknowledge that influences on my work extend far beyond those I had consciously recognised.
The dominant patriarchal literary culture names certain feminine qualities grotesque based on historical ideas of the classical masculine body. In an act of disobedience, feminist humour plunders the literary tradition that makes women disgusting and turns to the comic and regenerative power of the grotesque to claim and empower the female body. The feminist grotesque estranges the masculine bodily ideal implicit in the grotesque female form, and transports the female body from the abjected grotesque to a powerful subject. This paper will discuss the grotesque in relation to humour and the body, and particularly the female body. Revisionist feminist literature, such as Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, appropriates the abjected female body, the repository of this fear, and inverts the power structures that name it. The disobedient writer negates the power of the dominant authority. Humour such as irony and satire, and narrative strategies such as polyphony and metafiction fracture the single voice of authority and create new meaning. Humour alleviates the shock of the horror invested in the grotesque body and polyphony and metafiction disrupt the traditional novel form because it reminds the reader that single narrative voices are not as reliable as dominant ideology would have us believe. At the heart of Angela Carter’s text is the disruptive polyphonic fracturing of the single misogynistic voice of patriarchy. Carter appropriates the power that patriarchal laws governing femininity deploy when it names the grotesque female body.
Gabrielle Everall: I Thought I Would Die like DeleuzeA prose piece that can be performed as a reading or presented on a panel. In the piece I steal the ideas and experiences of dead philosophers and poets comparing them with my own experiences of transgression. I steal the ideas and experiences of Gilles Deleuze and Sylvia Plath. Gilles Deleuze jumped from the third floor of his apartment later dying from the injuries. The philosopher must not be scared of death. Similarly, I had fears of jumping off the third floor of my public housing apartment. In contradiction to the philosopher I am scared of death. When the protagonist in Sylvia Plath’s Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams is given e.c.t Johnny Panic ‘appears in a nimbus of arc lights on the ceiling overhead’ (1977, 39). Similarly, in my pink room in Graylands a man hovers above me in a dream or flashback. The piece is creative non-fiction. It gives the account of two hospitalizations.
Alex Dunkin: Forced re-creation: overcoming the restrictions of translating the Italian cannibale genreThis creative paper explores a re-creative model for reproducing the cannibale1 genre for non-Italian readers. It outlines the necessity and outcomes of such a model, which is required to overcome the difficulties in translating the genre’s texts.
Cannibale texts are loaded with critique of Italian culture and relies heavily on assumed social and knowledge to satirise the readers’ social norms. The use of Italian dialects and colloquial phrases, regular references to Italian popular culture icons, and the presentation of the Italian concept of ‘other’ enable cannibale texts to connect with Italian readers but simultaneously make translations unapproachable for foreign audiences.
While attempting to translate these texts, the characters and dialogue become so heavily altered so as to maintain their impact that a new creative piece is produced rather than a close translation or trans-creation.
The current presentation will visually display a model for analysing and producing cannibale texts. Appropriate sections of Italian examples will be introduced and compared to a new, Australian version of cannibale literature entitled Fair Day. A translated section of text by Niccolò Ammaniti will also be shown to highlight the impact of forced re-creation on the accessibility of the text for a non-Italian reader.
1 An Italian word meaning ‘cannibal’. The genre includes the work of authors such as Niccolò Ammaniti, Aldo Nove and Isabella Santacroce.
Since 2012 Australian organisation The Stella Prize has been counting the ratio between reviews of work by male and female writers. The findings of Stella, like the findings of US organisation VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts have found that creative writers are much more likely to get their work reviewed if they identify as male rather than female. In 2015, I partnered with Stella to conduct their first ever Diversity Count which examines not only gender, but also race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender identity and ability of creative writers in Australia. While I am expecting that women from diverse backgrounds are reviewed (and also, probably) published less than white, heterosexual, non-disabled writers, the more interesting question for me is how are they reviewed? Does their diversity or difference come into play in their reviews and for what purpose? This is critically important. If we continue to fetishise or exoticise the work of certain groups within our writing community, then we keep casting these groups into the margins of our literary world at the same time as fixing the patriarchal canon at the core of what we consider to be great or universal work. In this paper, I will speak to the findings of The Stella Diversity Count and examine the nature of the reviews received by diverse writers. It is my contention that our reviewing culture keeps some stories at the fringes of our literary culture and this had ramifications on not only what kinds of books get published, but also limits what certain writers feel that they can write about.
Nollie Nahrung: Stealing away to belong: Piqueering The Velveteen RabbitTo piqueer (also pickeer) means ‘to pillage, to make a flying skirmish’ (Walker & Smart 1836, pp. 468; 464). In this paper, this archaic word is taken to reference Cixous’ employment of the double meaning of the French verb voler (to steal and to fly) in relation to women’s writing, yet extend this productive duality to specifically address an act of queer literary “theft” and “flight”. This act is a piqueering of the children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, which uses remediation and digital collage techniques to make a “new” creative work from the source text. Comprising part of this paper, this work – The idea of queer: The Velveteen Rabbit remix – is used to explore connections between theft and collage in relation to cultural (re)production and queer belonging.
Alayna Cole:Moving Beyond the Self: How Blog Posts Can Inspire Narratives of Representation
‘Narratives of representation’ allow readers to see their own identities reflected within texts they access and can increase empathy by exposing readers to varied experiences (Smolkin & Young 2011: 217). Researching personal topics has traditionally relied on approaches that require direct contact between a researcher (writer) and a participant (Wilkinson & Thelwall 2011: 387), which can be time-consuming and expensive. The expression of personal experiences through autoethnography has also been adopted in the creation of these narratives as an alternative approach, but can limit the conclusions presented due to the restricted scope of experiences that can be explored (Méndez 2013). Critical analysis of blog posts offers new possibilities, allowing writers to explore how members of a social group candidly discuss their identities and the issues they face with each other and external parties. Accessing blog posts written by members of the queer community has allowed me to create specific narratives of representation underpinned by accurate and authentic depictions, ensuring readers are exposed to diverse perspectives that reflect reality. This paper explores the ways blog posts written by the queer community have influenced my depiction of queer identity in creative works and exegetical writing by inspiring and informing the exploration of issues such as mislabelling, stereotyping, discrimination, and fear.
Election Triptych
Using the found poetry of on-line forums, we create permanent compositions from an ephemeral stream of words and words as image. These works explore the phenomenological capacities of the page and seek techniques that build poem-compositions that account for space as much as line to give expression to the idea that a poem is ‘felt’ rather than ‘read’.
This creative research project engages with the idea of process-driven writing as a potential method for ecopoetics. Such a method draws of Heideggerian ideas of ‘dwelling’ to propose that through daily directed engagement with the immediate environment the poet can in some way be permitted access to the ‘four-fold’ of things. Adding an additional layer of complexity to the process, the composition is created in concert with the creative and critical work of the great mid-west poet William Stafford. Stafford pioneered ideas of process-driven writing before the development of ecocriticism. Heavily identified with the pacific north west, his work Averill (2001: 279) proposes allows everyone to feel centered ‘-in place, in language, in sensibility’. My creative work emerges from a daily practice of reading Stafford’s work and writing my own in response. February in Oregon collages my impressions of the Oregonian landscape with those of Staffords, seeking a way to feel at ‘home’ in the foreign landscape of Oregon. My paper is evenly divided into a critical section addressing the development of my compositional method and a performance of the resultant poem.
The Poet Jackson: A dao of poetry? Non-intentional composition, emergence, and intertextualityTen poems are presented, sampling my PhD research exploring how poetry might harmonise “Western” scientific and “Eastern” spiritual worldviews. The poems invite a liminal consciousness where science’s epistemic authority may meet on equal — not privileged — terms with the more ancient authorities of body and Earth. My chosen primary foci are modern physics, philosophical Daoism, and the ecosystemic perspective afforded by complexity theory (Capra & Luisi, 2014), in which large-scale patterns emerge unpredictably from relatively simple processes. This emergence, as Smith (2006, p. 172) remarks, is helpful in theorising how an artwork frequently “develops its own autonomous identity and ... takes the creator in directions quite different from his or her original intentions.” My methodology carries this further by seeking to abandon intention entirely. To achieve this I choose randomly from lists of sources and writing experiments. Influenced by the aleatory processes of conceptual writing and LANGUAGE poetry (Dworkin, n.d.; James, 2012), I appropriate, combine and re-present ideas and text from creative and non-fictional works. I take words from books or from what Tobin (2004, p. 126) calls the mind’s “other place” of poetry. A poem may or may not emerge; if one does, I have little idea what it may say or do. I work with eyes and fingers, pointing, highlighting, cutting and shuffling. I select and place text using body and instinct, not the thinking self. This non-intentional composition strives for the Daoist ideal of wei wuwei, action without action — egoless, selfless, apparently-effortless action. Moeller (2004) likens wei wuwei to Csíkszentmihályi’s (1990) concept of flow, the focused, effortless mental state also called “the zone”. Aspiring to become daojia shiren, “poet of Philosophical Daoism”, I practise yun you, “wandering like a cloud”, “searching everywhere” for the Way (Chen & Ji, 2016, pp. 178, 188).
Ali Black: To become a butterfly, a caterpillar first digests itself: Writing for repossession and transformation
Since 2014, I have been researching a biography of Sir William McMahon, prime minister of Australia from 1971-72. The only prime minister to have not been the subject of a biographical study, McMahon has offered an exciting way to approach and explore the issues that confront biographers during their work. For me, the most pressing of these issues have been the ethical ones: questions of ownership, of the multiple responsibilities owed by a biographer, and the consequences of a finished work.
In this paper, I examine the historical treatment and understanding of these ethical issues in order to contextualise my response to them as they’ve arisen in my practice. I argue that contention with these ethical issues is a necessary part of modern biographical practice and, indeed, demands both recognition of biography’s ‘profane’ nature and a justifying answer from the biographer—a tentative one of which, for my own work, I offer here.
David Unaipon (1872-1967) has been described as a scientist, author, anthropologist, preacher, inventor and public speaker. To these descriptions can be added musician, lecturer, curator, political activist, guide, and door-to-door salesman. A master of many trades, descriptions of Unaipon have struggled to merge the various aspects of his life into a single, coherent narrative. This paper focuses on Unaipon’s life stories – the stories told about him and his family and the stories he told about himself. A central argument of this paper is that, rather than describing Unaipon as a jack of all trades (or, worse, a master of none), Unaipon can accurately and productively be described as a “rhetor,” a person using various forms of media (and various forms of life writing) to present arguments across different social, political and cultural contexts to change beliefs about Aboriginality. To describe Unaipon as a rhetor can re-energise the arguments he put forward during his lifetime, can reveal the consistency and relationship between arguments he made in various fields or disciplines, can explain inconsistencies and contradictions in his life and writing, and, most importantly, can provoke debate and discussion about Unaipon’s life and writing at a time when, despite his prominence as one face on Australia’s $50 note, as the namesake of Australia’s most prestigious award for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing, and as an author anthologised in collections of Australian and Aboriginal writing, his writing is all but ignored in Australian culture and literary criticism.
Sue Joseph & Carolyn Rickett: To Begin to Know: David Leser resolves his 'burglar' eyesJanet Malcolm, the noted journalist and author, asserts that: ‘The biographer at work…is like the professional burglar’.1 However, this notion of theft transcends the limits of biography to include the life writing genre which often takes the stories of others in producing a text. This writerly practice raises ethical tensions for authors negotiating the space and intersections between self and other, and proprietorial entitlement. Increasingly, with the heightened awareness of vulnerable subjects and familial allegiances, harm minimisation is often a consideration constraining narration.
The focus of this paper is the method in which Australian author and journalist David Leser navigates these tensions – journalistic investigator and the dutiful son; former husband and doting father – in constructing his patriography To Begin To Know: Walking in the Shadows of My Father.2
A prolific story teller, narrating the story of his father, publishing great Bernard Leser, was impossible earlier in Leser’s career. But enmeshing it with his own story, ten years later, somehow bridged a tacit gap between father and son.
Rosemary Williamson: Natural Disaster and Writing the (Political) Self: Julia Gillard’s My Story and Anna Bligh’s Through the Wall
Through memoir, Australian politicians may reflect on leadership broadly but also on the particular challenges they face during extreme weather events. This is so in Julia Gillard’s My Story, published in 2014, and Anna Bligh’s Through the Wall: Reflections on Leadership, Love and Survival, published in 2015. Gillard was Prime Minister and Bligh was Premier of Queensland during the 2010-11 ‘summer of sorrow’, when floods wreaked havoc on large parts of Queensland. Gillard’s memoir devotes several pages to natural disaster, including the 2010-11 floods, and Bligh’s devotes over two chapters to the floods.
This paper will identify and compare the ways in which Gillard and Bligh frame their experiences of the 2010-11 natural disaster in the writing of their political selves. A possible consequence of this framing, it will argue, is that the memoirist serves to characterise not only herself, as a leader, but also the natural environment, as an adversary. This will be illustrated with particular reference to Bligh’s Through the Wall.
The paper will draw on and extend scholarship in the environmental humanities in a novel way, by viewing political memoir as a means by which dominant and potentially problematic views of the natural environment can be perpetuated. The writing of political memoir, in this sense, involves ethical considerations beyond those typically associated with the genre.
In 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that we are blind half our lives because of what we miss at night. If we writers, researchers and travellers are all blind half our lives because of what we miss during the night, what are the narratives and the perspectives on place that we’re missing out on?
This paper will explore the history of nocturnal travel writing in Europe through the 18th and 19th Centuries, focusing on work by flâneurs, or “noctambulators” as Beaumont calls them, who walked their cities in darkness: from Dickens and his night walks in London (1861) through to Restif de la Brettone (1789) and Nerval who embraced the possibilities of caprice with his “extreme” nocturnal wandering in Paris (1852).
The second part of this paper will look at nocturnal travel writing and the flâneur from a modern perspective. This will be an auto-analysis of my own work in After Dark: A nocturnal exploration of Madrid (2016) which seeks to capture the same perspective of the “amateur detective and investigator of the city” as inspired by Walter Benjamin, though in a contemporary, nocturnal setting. Beyond presenting a unique perspective of the “otherness” of the city at night, it is my hope that After Dark also challenges the stasis of many contemporary works of travel writing, by not becoming “a function of learned judgement” (1978, p.67) as Said cautioned against in Orientalism, rather a piece which has an identifiable creative and ethical core.
Language journalism is a genre of writing which has emerged out of creative nonfiction over the past few decades. While the usefulness of genre classification has been debated in literary studies, a linguistic perspective sees genre, and the social contexts genres exist within, as essential in text creation. This paper discusses how language journalism has emerged as a result of how writers have responded to the changing social context of the past half century. Noam Chomsky and his influence in the field of linguistics and the status of English as a global language are used to illustrate the social contexts from which language journalism has emerged due to the ways writers have responded to these changing circumstances.
Jennifer Anderson: The Art of Travel'The Art of Travel' is an extract from a chapter of the same name in Permission to Speak: An Australian Student in China, 1979-1983, a memoir that explores the continuing process of personal transformation sparked by living among Chinese people and students from different countries in early post-Mao China. As she studies modern Chinese literature at Nanjing University, the narrator acquires a growing appreciation for Chinese poetics, inflected with a western Anglophone feminist sensibility and further re-shaped by limited Chinese linguistic and cultural proficiency. ‘The Art of Travel’ is a transcultural rumination on the purpose and aesthetics of travel, and on different ways of seeing. It identifies travel as the juxtaposition of moments of intense realization and discovery with those of extreme tedium, irritation and incomprehensibility. It explores the workings of resonance as a Sinophone sensibility in an Anglophone memoir genre.
Kathryn Hummel: Suite from The Bangalore Set: the poetry of ethnographic collaboration
Unknowing is a fictocritical piece combining science fiction and essay to explore how ecological crisis necessitates new modes of story-telling. It is an experiment in writing the Chthulucene – a term coined by Donna Haraway that captures “real and possible timespaces” (160), borrowing from Lovecraftian horror to evoke the global, tentacular systems of inter-species being and becoming in the context of climate crisis, species loss and natural disaster.
This piece appropriates the work of science fiction/weird writers China Miéville and Jeff Vandermeer to put forward some embryonic ideas on thinking, feeling and knowing in the Anthropocene, taking vegetal life as a powerful actor in worlds of mutual transformation between humans and non-humans. It therefore steals now only from existing literary practice but also the semiotic processes of plants themselves to suggest a way of recognising the subjectivities of autopoietic lifeforms within living systems of exchange.
Informed by recent work in plant intelligence and new theories of posthumanism that call for a “flow of relations with multiple others” (Braidotti 50), Unknowing evokes the constantly evolving affiliations and assemblages that characterise vegetal life, especially within periods of planetary flux. It is a preliminary work that hopes to contribute to discussion of the role of weird, monstrous and fabulist writing in response to environmental crisis.
As Jeremy Hawthorn and Jakob Lothe acknowledge in their introduction to an edited 2013 collection on the topic, the very mention of the term ‘narrative ethics’ ‘carries with it . . . a certain ideological charge’ (1). This charge signals a turn away from the assumptions—if not the tools—of the literary theories of structuralism and poststructuralism, and toward a contemporary discourse returning us to earlier notions of literature as an essentially ethical project. The new turn, or return, to ethics may be distinguished by its figuration as a rhetorically-constructed encounter or relationship between an author, the form of the narrative, and a reader. Conceiving of the reading experience as an ‘encounter’ shifts our conception from reading the ethical content of a work toward reading our encounter with that work.
Lorrie’s Moore’s short story ‘People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Oink’ stands out as a text in which the readerly encounter is dominated by the ethical claims of the narrative. It may be more accurate to say that ‘People Like That are the Only People Here’ is a story built across what I might call ‘zones of narrative ethical ambiguity’: Moore’s story is told in a precarious and ethically-charged boundary space between fiction and non-fiction; art and reality; and narrative and the limits of narrative. The exceptional position of such a text makes equally exceptional ethical claims on its readers, and in this paper I work through attempts to negotiate these claims.
Is creativity a way to take control of chaos? In creating, the artist takes a chance on an uncertain outcome: a risk for something important, a need to express a view of the chaos of life, to make sense of the nonsensical. Considering how real life muddies the logic of ethical analysis, any attempt at recreating reality must take responsibility for reality’s unknowability.
Writing poethically must therefore acknowledge that ‘real’ is not an uncontested attribute, and reality is about individual conception. This ideal must also be tempered by a consideration of the one unchanging element, human nature.
In this two-part workshop, participants will consider a range of theoretical approaches to Creativity and their applications in practice from diverse perspectives, including philosophy, aesthetics, sociology and psychology. The aim is to explore the essential features of Creativity and how they play out procedurally from different points of view.
In the morning session, participants will be introduced to the topic and will be presented with a synopsis of the different approaches. Suggested readings will be provided. However, we are asking participants to come with their own readings and experiences of Creativity with respect to their particular media. We are aiming to have as many practical examples as possible, please.
In the afternoon session, Creativity will be presented within more of a social frame, in particular, that derived from the French social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu. A copy of Professor Michael Grenfell's translation of Bourdieu's seminar with fine art students in Nîmes will be provided for participants prior to the workshop. This debate sets creative endeavor within an analysis of the field of cultural reproduction, and the dynamics it contains. This field will be explored, as it exists in the twenty-first century, and the use of Bourdieu's tools both in understanding and operating within it. In particular, participants will be encouraged to consider 'Social' and 'objective art' as contrasting terms which might help us to better understand the way the creative impulse is instantiated in trans-historic and contemporary contexts.
