Kate Middleton Reviews Bella Li single work   essay  
Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 Kate Middleton Reviews Bella Li
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Bella Li’s Argosy offers readers a book of real adventure: the adventure of form, and a challenge to our sense of what shapes a narrative. This work is fundamentally hybrid: amid short texts and textual sequences that may be termed prose poems, or micro-essays, or short short fictions, Li intersperses works of collage and photography. These visual elements of the work are not supplemental or separate, but are themselves linked to its central narratives. The whole book takes its cues from the collage novels of Max Ernst; his Une semaine de bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage and The Hundred Headless Woman provide the titles for the two sequences presented in Li’s work. At the same time that she draws upon Ernst, however, Li offers significant reconfiguration of surrealistic working methods. Where Ernst accompanied his collage images with captions – producing a text that bears a relation to the contemporary graphic novel – Li offers discrete segments of pure visual narrative, followed by sections of the work in which only text appears. The full-colour reproduction of this work makes for a lush object, which reminds us how central the ability to dwell with pictorial work has been in the history of reading. The interplay between the visual and verbal work provides a dimensionality that would be difficult to achieve through text alone, allowing critique to emerge in the friction between the two. These are works that are informed by postcolonial and feminist thought: they do not provide disquisition upon these topics, but offer instead an imaginative inhabitation of these ways of seeing the world.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Cordite Poetry Review Land vol. 82 1 August 2017 11953841 2017 periodical issue

    'When we chose to edit an issue of Cordite Poetry Review around the theme of ‘Land’, it was with an interest in the inherent openness of the word. Similarly, we came without a strong affiliation to any particular poetics, though of course our own aesthetic, moral and intellectual predispositions followed us. The process of reading through the many submissions was exploratory and open-minded.' (Editorial)

    2017
Last amended 27 Sep 2017 14:51:25
http://cordite.org.au/reviews/middleton-li/ Kate Middleton Reviews Bella Lismall AustLit logo Cordite Poetry Review
Subjects:
  • Argosy Bella Li , 2017 selected work poetry
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