Cirrus@Austlit

'This paper will investigate creative dislocation and the idea of the writer as exiled self through reflections on the traction and slippages between ideas of place, dislocation and writing. For a writer, producing creative work through the experience of dislocation, whether voluntary or enforced, can be isolating and difficult, but it can also bring new perspectives and opportunities for creative capacity and expression. The creative resonances of writing in exile will be explored here with reference to David Malouf’s celebrated novella An Imaginary Life (1978) in which he depicts exile as a necessary journey of becoming, a ‘dynamic marginality’ as Braidotti observes (2002: 129), which offers creative possibility rather than closure and loss. For the writer Ovid, dislocation is phenomenological prerequisite for selftransformation. His discovery is that the writer must always be at the edge of things, noticing differently, available to possibility, able to embody and to channel being as metamorphoses through creative expression.' (Publication abstract)

'Nature writers of the Romantic movement responded to the exploitation of natural resources and loss of untamed nature in an age of technological innovation. This legacy of Romanticism pervades contemporary writings about nature and place. However, ideas advanced through Romantic writings of ‘nature as a redemptive force’ and the ideological separation of nature and culture remain problematic (Adam 1998). If one does not consider this legacy and question inherited conventions, myths about nature are likely to be reinforced. In this paper, I explore some of Romanticism’s legacies for nature writing and how contemporary writers draw on and resist the established conventions. I argue that Australian cities provide sites of resistance, where assumptions of Romanticism might be addressed by writers. Cities are places not traditionally associated with nature writing and places where nature/culture relationships might be re-imagined, complicating notions of place, nature and the urban to arrive at new post-Romantic ways of writing nature.' (Publication abstract)

'Although ecocriticism has roots in Romanticism, much discourse around ecopoetry has come to hinge on a distancing from a ‘Romantic’, ‘ego-driven’ style of poetry, seen to be unethical. Such positions problematize lyric poetry, given its strong association with both Romanticism and the formal centrality of the self. This paper contends that lyric is often conflated with a reductive view of Romanticism and seeks to uncouple the form from such views. Looking to the work of Australian poet Robert Adamson, lyric is framed here as a performative mode rather than a genre, and is presented as an engaged type of ethical discourse which functions via reader answerability. Maintaining a Merleau-Pontean ontology as regards the lyric subject and the dynamic between word and world, and drawing upon Barthes’s use of the term ‘place’, the paper concludes that the lyric can function as a decidedly ethical ecopoetry, in which the place of lyric is also the place of the ecopoetic.' (Publication abstract)

'This article examines the legacy of Romanticism on Australian settlement, using analysis of early colonial narrative to investigate how a public hungry for writing of all genres and schooled for centuries by the adventure tales of white heroes – ‘free of the complexities of relations with white women’ as Patrick Brantlinger notes – came to authorise the theft of Aboriginal land and the violation of her people. Through the close analysis of an account by one of Victoria’s first settlers, Joseph Tice Gellibrand, this work seeks to unveil how word and action often belie one another in colonial narratives, acting to legitimate what was in fact unlawful through what Michel Foucault refers to as a ‘hazardous play of dominations’ (1981: 52). Drawing on Marxist and post-colonial analysis of the Romantic era and its ‘prevailing anxiety with difference and otherness’ (Saree Makdisi, 2009: 36), I examine how ideas about race and sovereignty were normalised through the expedient use of writing, and in doing so, demonstrate how, in Victoria, the written word has everything to do with authority, property and ownership. I conclude that it is through creative writing that we can help to bring about social change: through work that seeks, as Jen Webb states, ‘to make things visible’, to ‘provide a platform’ (2015: 61) from which to unsettle notions of settlement and sovereignty.' (Publication abstract)

'At this time in history, climate change predicts that we are once again dwarfed by nature. Nature is as Massey (2008) suggests, understood as the classic foundations for our contemplation of place and our fascinations with belonging to place. As creative writers, artists and scholars respond to escalating temperatures, rising sea levels and natural disasters, on a daily basis, the threat of climate change events loom large in the contemporary imagination. Humankind’s pride in domination over all things natural is being put to the test, as we begin to anticipate the terrifying spectacle of our own damnation. From an ecological and eco-critical perspective, climate change may be considered, as the contemporary ‘abomination’ as it poses both a moral and a psychological paradox for us all. It is not an hallucinatory fantasy, nor is it a social pathology. Contemporary Australian Gothic drama explores the paradoxical relationship between perceptions of what is absent and what is present, between past and future, between climate, nature and disappearing landscapes and geographies. It is within this paradox of perception that Australian Gothic drama responds to literary legacies of Romanticism as we ‘lament the loss of spiritual connections’ to nature (Bate 1991: 17). This paper discusses the environmental and eco-critical themes embedded in two of my theatrical works, Dust 2016 and Salvation 2013, in which notions of evil in the Romantic sense are discovered in the ecologies of landscape, place and space from which we as humans are, in turn, becoming alienated.' (Publication abstract)

'Contemporary Australian cultural studies has seen a move towards a multimodal awareness of space and place in writing – a speculative turn in both critical and creative work confronting the subject/object dichotomy as a limitation in place-making. Theorists such as Ross Gibson, Stephen Muecke and Michael Farrell offer beautiful conceptualisations of written spaces, drawing from several philosophical traditions, which might give context to contemporary creative practices. This writing regularly draws from movement as an integral feature of the practice discussed, with walking emerging in several approaches to re-envision the poet wanderer. But it is also possible to trace in this writing an act of selfmanifestation, a desire for the ‘doing-making’ of self to be inscribed within the multimodal spaces created. This paper will argue that this layering of self and space in the act of writing is both akin to and actively opposing the tradition of Romantic thought. While several features of the practices invoked might seem to draw from similar acts of immersion in landscape, the underlying trope of the Romantic poet’s divine communion is inverted in the speculative drive towards multimodal relation.

'This paper considers the transformative use of the sublime aesthetic in two contemporary Gothic novels, Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969) and Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015). My exploration begins with the Romantic sublime, defined here as a mode of perception created through art that is concerned with the awe-inspiring, the frightening and the ineffable. Sublime metamorphosis extends the Romantic sublime alongside the more fragmentary postmodern sublime through posthumanism. Sublime metamorphoses occur in these two speculative novels when their protagonists pause in the moment of sublime arrest in response to nonhuman others. Such moments create new embodied potentialities that may reshape human/nonhuman relations. When Carter’s central protagonist Marianne considers her position in moments of terror, she improves her marginalised status. She pushes through the boundaries of her species and the limitations of an injured world of mutation and brutality, evolving, in the end, to Tiger Lady. In Wood’s novel, the entrapped Yolanda shifts from prey to predator to a new kind of self-determination that frees her from her human confinement. Yolanda’s friend Verla follows with her own radical transmutation. In these novels sublime metamorphosis resists ideas of human exceptionality and troubles typologies that separate humans from other creatures. This approach may be of interest to creative writers concerned with more generative relations with the world’s nonhuman creatures. My own creative efforts are learning from such work.' (Publication abstract)