Cheryl O'Byrne Cheryl O'Byrne i(18044415 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 “A Search for Presence or a Reflection on Absence?” : Aesthetics and Ethics in Kate Grenville’s One Life: My Mother’s Story Cheryl O'Byrne , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: A/b: Auto/Biography Studies , vol. 37 no. 1 2022; (p. 1-23)

'This essay contributes to conversations about the ethical complexities that arise when a writer transforms a subject’s firsthand accounts into a narrative for a broad readership. It asks if the aesthetic features of Kate Grenville’s One Life: My Mother’s Story (2015) can both prioritize readers’ engagement and allow for an ethical portrayal of the mother-subject.' (Publication abstract)

1 Aboriginal Women's Life-History Writing, Settler Reading and Not Just Black and White Cheryl O'Byrne , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , 11 December vol. 37 no. 3 2022;

'In a 2019 article in The Guardian, Gomeroi poet, essayist and legal scholar Alison Whittaker declared ‘Blak literature is in a golden age. Our white audiences, who are majorities in both literary industry and buying power, are deep in an unseen crisis of how to deal with it.’ This essay tries to understand what constitutes the crisis, how settler readers, like me, might see it and emerge from it, and what some of the stakes are. I consider the reading crisis in relation to the dominant model for reading testimonial literature established by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, which positions the reader/listener as empathetic co-owner of the speaker’s trauma and powerful enabler of their testimony. Following Libby Porter, I contend settlers can progress to ‘more mature ways of responding to the invitation to a sovereign relationship.’ I discuss three strategies settler readers can implement to this end: focus on the presence of the writer, position themselves as outsiders wanting to listen and recognise themselves as implicated subjects. I ground the discussion in the 2015 life-history text Not Just Black and White: A Conversation between a Mother and Daughter by Murri women Lesley Williams and Tammy Williams.' (Publication abstract)

1 ‘To Unearth the Layers of Forgetting’ : Reading Boy, Lost as a Postmemoir Cheryl O'Byrne , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Life Writing , vol. 18 no. 2 2021; (p. 181-193)

'This article reads Kristina Olsson’s Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir (2013, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.) as a postmemorial text. The memoir centres on the moment, six years before Olsson was born, when a thirteen-month-old baby was abducted from Olsson’s mother’s arms. The article relies on Marianne Hirsch’s (2012, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. ProQuest.) theory of postmemory to examine the way the memoir is motivated both by the confusion Olsson feels about the way her own life was shaped by this hidden, traumatic past and by the responsibility she feels to write towards a sense of justice for her mother. The article dwells on the ethical concerns that arise at the point of tension between the writer’s desire for recovery and the mother’s silences, and it examines the aesthetic strategies Olsson employs to negotiate this tension. The article also draws on Meera Atkinson’s (2017, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Bloomsbury. ProQuest.) work to discuss the way Olsson situates her family’s trauma within the context of the cultural and social factors that precipitated it. The article argues that Boy, Lost offers a methodology for an ethical postmemorial project through the way it balances Olsson’s story with her mother’s and with the country’s.' (Publication abstract)

1 'Betwix and Between' : Rereading Poppy as Autofiction Cheryl O'Byrne , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Philament , September no. 25 2019;
'Autofiction has been a buzzword within anglophone literary circles in recent years. Several books published in 2018 stimulated the mainstream conversation, including Rachel Cusk’s Kudos, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, Olivia Laing’s Crudo, and the final instalment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. Scholarship on the mode also flourished in 2018: Hywel Dix edited a groundbreaking essay collection called Autofiction in English, and Marjorie Worthington published the first monograph on American autofiction. The concept of autofiction has been part of the French literary lexicon since the late 1970s, introduced by Serge Doubrovsky and developed by theorists [END PAGE 7] such as Vincent Colonna, Philippe Gasparini, Arnaud Genon, Isabelle Grell, and Philippe Vilain; its appearance in English-language conversations, however, is a recent phenomenon.' (Introduction)
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