Cirrus@Austlit

'The name Christos Tsiolkas may as well be a synonym for “controversial.” The term peppers most critical and popular articles about the writer’s work, such that what Zuckerman terms Tsiolkas’s “provocations” almost no longer bear comment. Yet for first-year students of Australian literature, such content may not be as commonplace as this discourse suggests. Indeed, the provocations of the Tsiolkas oeuvre, despite their affiliation with key genres and concerns of contemporary Australian literature, may prove too confronting or too overwhelming for the novice literary critic. This article maps a range of issues arising from the study of Tsiolkas’s work in a first-year Australian literature course at a regional university in Australia. With a particular focus on what is perhaps the author’s most controversial work, Dead Europe (2005), we consider why Tsiolkas’s narratives can be so difficult for literary studies students and outline how the use of reflective practice offers a safe space for engaging with such “triggering” work.' (Publication abstract)

"This chapter provides an analysis of the leaky representations of time, space and the body in the Australian drug text: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977). The drug narrative provides a platform where alternative corporeal possibilities can be played out, reflective of the way the body is inhabited by and inhabits space. In the literary sphere the drug trope reframes spatial and temporal regulatory notions of the body. The drug metaphor disrupts temporal linearity through the reconfiguration of junk time. Likewise, landscapes, cityscapes and a sense of place are re-imaged in fluid, drugged dreamscapes. For this examination of the narcoticisation of the city in Garner’s novel, this chapter utilises Walter Benjamin’s notions of the urban space as a ‘narcotic dream’ and Elizabeth Grosz’s anatomisation of ‘uncontainability’ and corporeal ‘leakiness.’ Garner’s novel uses the drug trope to reconceptualise the spatiotemporal boundaries that normally confine women, and then to create new meanings."

Source: Abstract.

'This chapter proposes that in the literary sphere the drug trope reframes spatial and temporal regulatory notions of the body. The drug metaphor disrupts temporal linearity through the reconfiguration of “junk time”. Likewise, landscapes, cityscapes and a sense of place are re-imagined in fluid, drugged dreamscapes. In this way, drug imagery evokes leakages and slippages across time, space and the body enabling a re-evaluation of corporeal possibilities and potential. The “perverse” portrayal of the subject-body in drug literature is hyperbolised through the drug trope. The extremities of drug use also magnify the examination of difference between bodies based on gender and corresponding (dis)connections with space and time. A textual analysis of the Australian novel, Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977) in this chapter provides a literary example.'

Source: Abstract.

Susan Sheridan's The Fiction of Thea Astley is worthy and comprehensive foci on one of Australia's most astute writers of fiction. The book captures the intelligence and significance of Thea Astley's fiction -its evolution and its points of difference.' (Introduction)