Cirrus@Austlit

An introduction to this volume of papers from the Excess, Desire and Twentieth- to Twenty-First-Century Women’s Writing. A Hecate and Contemporary Women’s Writing Association conference held at the School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland, 8–10 February 2017.

Can women have some other way of writing? If so, what is it? Such questions have been asked in literary theory for a long time, and now, as a writer, I tried to gain my own understanding of the creative process. French theorists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray answered with a resounding yes, but the écriture féminine they posited still seemed constrained by the binaries they fought so hard against. Even though I knew that feminine meant much more than anatomical sex or performed gender in this context, when Cixous spoke of a “universal woman subject to emerge and bring women to their senses” (880), I couldn’t imagine what this universal woman might look like. What colour would she be? What characteristics would she have? Would she be she at all? 'Informed by the corporeal philosophies of Elisabeth Grosz and Karina Quinn (Eades), and the creative texts of Marguerite Duras, Clarice Lispector and Lidia Yuknavitch, I began to explore the idea of a corporeal writing. Writing of and through bodies, writing that seeks to increase diversity by representing body in all its complexities. The association of masculine texts with universality and feminine texts with particularity has been well documented and critiqued. Corporeal writing provides a platform and a counterpoint to the conception of universal experience, not only for women, but for all. Presented here is not a roadmap. I am not advocating a set of rules to be followed. Instead, this body offers reflections — one writer’s experiences — the sensations related to being one of a multitude.' (Introduction)

'Eleanor Dark’s novel “Pilgrimage” has never been published. She began writing it in January 1921, a year before her marriage, and finished it in the late 1920s, when she and Eric Dark were establishing their home in Katoomba.1 In the early 1930s, Eleanor tried to get “Pilgrimage” published, sending it to her literary agent in London, and showing it to P.R. Stephensen, who had published her novel Prelude to Christopher in Sydney in 1934 (Brooks with Clark 122). “Pilgrimage” was not accepted for publication, and Eleanor appears to have abandoned any attempt at this.' (Introduction)

'A journey is not just marked by things. It is marked by our lived experience. My story is informed by my lived experience of the National Party government of Joh Bjelke-Petersen who became Premier of Queensland in 1968. The Queensland State parliament administers an area greater than Britain, France, Germany and Italy combined and to travel its length is to travel the distance from London to St. Petersburg. Bjelke-Petersen’s administration menaced us, threatened us and metaphorically acted like a crop duster, flying low whilst disgorging its contents. We expected to be showered with superphosphate. Instead, we were showered with something more akin to an organophosphate that had been stockpiled since the Cold War. Wherever it came from, we knew we were going to suffer. We were in for the fight of our lives: “don’t you worry about that.”' (Introduction)

'Two recent award-winning Australian novels, both of a dystopian cast of mind, Alexis Wright's 'The Swan Book' (2013) and Charlotte Wood's 'The Natural Way of Things' (2015), employ fable to tell powerful contemporary stories. In both novels the issues explored are so violent and threatening to life itself that fable rather than realist narrative becomes the best vehicle for staging them. Here I begin by comparing these two novels briefly, considering the different meanings and uses that "fable" might have for a novelist dealing with such issues of violence (colonial, patriarchal, ecological). I go on to suggest some connections between the uses of fable made by these two novelists and some important feminist writers of the late twentieth century, most notably Angela Carter. The remainder of the essay is focussed on 'The Swan Book' and the way Wright uses the forms of fable to write a story geared to catastrophic times of climate change, representing country as a living entity and inventing a new fable of the black swan and the swan woman.'  (Publication abstract)