Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Kathleen Davidson Reviews ‘Falling Backwards’ by Jo Jones
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'Jo Jones’s Falling Backwards is balanced on the notion that “Some stories are hard to tell.” The question of how best to engage with this trauma—how to look back, openly and sensitively, into the darkness of Australia’s colonial past—is at the heart of her volume. The titular image of falling backwards gestures towards this work’s primary insight. Falling is usually an involuntary act. Yet, in acknowledging that we must tumble loose from our present assumptions, we might open ourselves up to a productive disorientation. This process allows ideas about self and other, belonging and identity, to shift and emerge anew. Ultimately, Falling Backwards is a thoughtful analysis of the politics of literary form in contemporary historical fiction. Jones does not object to realism per se, but to the ethical compromises that can occur when this classically linear, unified and self-affirming mode is applied to the representation of a positivistically unknowable past. ' (Introduction)

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    y separately published work icon Long Paddock The Lives of Others vol. 78 no. 2 2018 15985444 2018 periodical issue

    'The Lives of Others is concerned with the debts and obligations that accompany the passing of the generations. “For no one bears this life alone” is how Hölderlin describes the mutuality that binds us to our forebears. Each of the contributors to this issue of Southerly endeavours to understand the ways in which this mutuality guides out actions and behaviours. What forms of writing and memorialisation can assist us to acknowledge the unfinished nature of the relationships that link the present to the past, the living to the dead? Is there a way to answer the phantom’s call yet keep faith with those secrets that have made their home in us?' (Introduction)

    2018
Last amended 3 Apr 2019 13:39:44
http://southerlyjournal.com.au/2019/03/08/kathleen-davidson-reviews-falling-backwards-by-jo-jones/ Kathleen Davidson Reviews ‘Falling Backwards’ by Jo Jonessmall AustLit logo Long Paddock
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