Cirrus@Austlit

'Across the four novels Daniel Davis Wood has published to date, it is possible to delineate an evolving ethics of literary voice. His initial step in Blood and Bone is to subvert the third-person omniscient voice by drastically expanding the imaginative abilities of the first-person narrator, thus showing how the narrator must always speak through a subjective position. The second step involves examining the extent to which the narrator’s desire is not their own: the narrator of Unspeakable is portrayed as the victim of toxic narcissism and media manipulation, for instance, while the protagonist of At the Edge of the Solid World is so alienated from his own emotions that he relives the calamities of others to process his own tragedy. Despite possessing the quasi-omniscient powers of Blood and Bone, these two narrators, far from being godlike, are shown to be puppets of desires that are not their own. The outcome is the dissolution of the subjective “I” in In Ruins, in which the narrator comes to understand the Otherness that permeates human subjectivity. Moral failures are dissolved by the inability to say “I”, making the new ethical task bearing witness to the desire of the Other.' (Publication abstract)

'Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture by Paul Giles is an erudite and perceptive account of how the literature of Australia and New Zealand entwine with the key texts and ideas of literary and artistic modernism. Its particular value is how it shows, with satisfying weight, the value of both the antipodes and its literature on the global stage.' (Introduction)

'John A. Scott began his literary life as a poet, but a fellowship in Paris persuaded him to write novels instead. The move was a success, with Scott’s fiction winning the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and being shortlisted twice for the Miles Franklin Award. This book aims to illuminate his texts by guiding the reader through some of the key ideas and influences that have informed his Orphic journey from poet to novelist.

'John A. Scott is one of the greatest Australian writers of his generation, yet his work has largely been overlooked by the world of academic criticism. From Poet to Novelist: The Orphic Journey of John A. Scott aims to correct this oversight by providing the reader with the tools to read and understand this important author.

'The complexity of Scott’s writings makes this book an invaluable guide to his work for readers at all levels. His debt to the French avant-garde, for instance, means that there are numerous hidden references to authors like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Breton, Aragon and, most prominently, Rimbaud, that require explanation to retrieve the work from obscurity and misunderstanding. Scott engages a wide-ranging set of texts and ideas, from nineteenth-century realism to Australian political history, which are illuminated by this book.

'Scott’s career may be divided between his initial incarnation as a poet, followed by a deeply considered decision to give up poetry and write prose fiction instead. The works that Scott produces in the lead-up to this transition thus thematize the abandonment of poetry, considering it in light of such precedents as Rimbaud, as well as the Greek myth of Orpheus. The impossibility of truly renouncing poetry is signaled by Scott’s return to the genre some twenty-five years later. The book also examines how Scott matures as a fiction writer, both in the complexity of his style and in his growing concern with ethics and politics.

'Written in an accessible manner that will be helpful to new readers, the first in-depth academic study of Scott’s work also holds the complexity and depth that will appeal to long-time connoisseurs of his work.

'From Poet to Novelist: The Orphic Journey of John A. Scott is a valuable resource for academic researchers, students, and general readers interested in Australian literature and culture.' (Publication summary)

'This essay looks at the significance of the semblable, the figure of the double or likeness, which Brian Castro borrows, in this instance, from Baudelaire. The similarity of the semblable helps to draw out in Castro's fiction not only what is familiar but also, in an uncanny move, what is unfamiliar about the world around us, its essential foreignness. Castro's fascination with the foreign springs from a double ethical impetus: first, as an outsider's refusal of the racist prejudices of mainstream society and, second, as a recognition of the radical contingency that underpins all existence, making each of us a foreigner, as it were, in the world. The essay then considers the recurrent tendency in Castro's novels to "overwrite" the stories of others in ways that similarly blur the line between self and Other: O'Young's translation of Shan in Birds of Passage, for instance, or Artie Catacomb's attempts to hijack the story of Sergei Wespe in Double-Wolf, with each antagonist becoming the double (or semblable) of his counterpart. Finally, the essay examines the normalizing function of the gaze, with Castro borrowing from Sartre and Lacan, such as the latter's discussions of anamorphosis in Pomeroy. Castro demonstrates in his fiction how this gaze can be subverted and confused by the subject's adoption of a second (or even multiple) identities, a deliberate cultivation of the semblable that helps to protect the vulnerable outsider from the normalizing power of the gaze.' (Publication abstract) 

'This article explores the ethical concept of the neighbour, an idea central to the fiction of Tim Winton. The first part focuses on how the ghosts in Cloudstreet symbolize an Australian culture haunted by the injustices of colonization, especially the dispossession of the Indigenous people. The second part looks at the paradox of being commanded to love one’s neighbour, comparing an early story, “Neighbours”, to Winton’s recent novel Eyrie. The third part looks at Winton’s ethics of neighbourliness in light of recent critical reworkings of this concept by Slavoj Žižek and Kenneth Reinhard. Central to this section is the importance of time and place to the ethics of the neighbour, in particular the repeated insistence by both Winton and his critics that, rather than focusing on the past, we should acknowledge the neighbour who stands before us in the here and now.'  (Introduction)