Pulse Points single work   short story  
Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Pulse Points
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Ramesh had known Gerry for years - eight in fact, as long as he and Henry had been together - but this was, in a way, like meeting him all over again.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Kill Your Darlings no. 28 January 2017 10745695 2017 periodical issue

    'We have gone to print a few days after the US election, and the aftershocks of this most troubling result are still resounding. Much is still to be written about this world-changing event, but in the meantime here at KYD we recognise the important role the arts now has to play in interpreting these events, creating pathways to change, and enabling regeneration.' (Editorial introduction)

    2017
    pg. 101-118
  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Pulse Points : Stories Jennifer Down , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2017 11679894 2017 selected work short story

    'The characters in Jennifer Down’s Pulse Points live in small dusty towns, glittering exotic cities and slow droll suburbs; they are mourners, survivors and perpetrators. 

    'In the award-winning ‘Aokigahara’, a young woman travels to the sea of trees in Japan to say goodbye. In ‘Coarsegold’, a woman conducts an illicit affair while her recovering girlfriend works the overnight motel shift in the middle of nowhere. In ‘Dogs’, Foggo runs an unruly gang of bored, cruel boys with a scent for fresh meat. In ‘Pressure Okay’ a middle-aged man goes to the theatre, gets a massage, remembers his departed wife, navigates the long game of grief with his adult daughter.' (Publication Summary)

    Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2017
    pg. 1-18

Works about this Work

Words Are Not Enough: Loss, Grief and Incommunicability in Jennifer Down’s Short Stories ‘Aokigahara’ and ‘Pulse Points’ Gretchen Shirm , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 30 September vol. 37 no. 2 2022;

'This essay argues that Jennifer Down’s two stories ‘Aokigahara’ and ‘Pulse Points’ point to the limits of referential language in conveying grief, loss and related emotional experiences. Referencing Denise Riley’s theories from The Words of Selves and Impersonal Passion, I use Down’s stories as demonstrative of the concept that word choices do in fact contain emotion and affect and can transmit emotional experiences between the characters, and via characters from author to reader. Nonetheless, very often the referential properties of language are troubled in this process, and Down demonstrates the way in which the writer might convey affect and emotion through the techniques of silence, withholding, miscommunications and also through the unfolding of the narrative itself. Down avoids simplistic notions of closure and mourning by suggesting that the difficulty her characters experience is identifying the appropriate linguistic conventions to describe their emotional states, perhaps because there are none that can fully contain them. However, in the unfolding of these stories, difficult emotions and affects can be gestured towards, even outlined. Through this paradox, emotion and affect can indeed be ‘held’ not just in language, but in story, and this is particularly so when it moves away from signifying emotions in symbolic terms and represents them in a narrative sequence through an embodied narrator.' (Introduction)

Moral Panics and Masculinities : Queering Australian YA Jonno Revanche , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , April 2018;

'For a generation of boys, the youth lit canon often centralised visceral physicality over true intimacy and vulnerability. But for today’s young queer readers grappling with questions of gender and desire, a new canon is emerging that captures more nuanced and diverse ways to come of age.' (Introduction)

October in Fiction Michalia Arathimos , 2017 single work column
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , October 2017;
October in Fiction Michalia Arathimos , 2017 single work column
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , October 2017;
Moral Panics and Masculinities : Queering Australian YA Jonno Revanche , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , April 2018;

'For a generation of boys, the youth lit canon often centralised visceral physicality over true intimacy and vulnerability. But for today’s young queer readers grappling with questions of gender and desire, a new canon is emerging that captures more nuanced and diverse ways to come of age.' (Introduction)

Words Are Not Enough: Loss, Grief and Incommunicability in Jennifer Down’s Short Stories ‘Aokigahara’ and ‘Pulse Points’ Gretchen Shirm , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 30 September vol. 37 no. 2 2022;

'This essay argues that Jennifer Down’s two stories ‘Aokigahara’ and ‘Pulse Points’ point to the limits of referential language in conveying grief, loss and related emotional experiences. Referencing Denise Riley’s theories from The Words of Selves and Impersonal Passion, I use Down’s stories as demonstrative of the concept that word choices do in fact contain emotion and affect and can transmit emotional experiences between the characters, and via characters from author to reader. Nonetheless, very often the referential properties of language are troubled in this process, and Down demonstrates the way in which the writer might convey affect and emotion through the techniques of silence, withholding, miscommunications and also through the unfolding of the narrative itself. Down avoids simplistic notions of closure and mourning by suggesting that the difficulty her characters experience is identifying the appropriate linguistic conventions to describe their emotional states, perhaps because there are none that can fully contain them. However, in the unfolding of these stories, difficult emotions and affects can be gestured towards, even outlined. Through this paradox, emotion and affect can indeed be ‘held’ not just in language, but in story, and this is particularly so when it moves away from signifying emotions in symbolic terms and represents them in a narrative sequence through an embodied narrator.' (Introduction)

Last amended 1 Feb 2019 07:33:05
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