Stephane Christophe Cordier Stephane Christophe Cordier i(18492448 works by)
Gender: Male
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1 Ethics of Representation and Self-reflexivity : Nicolas Rothwell’s Narrative Essays Stephane Christophe Cordier , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 20 no. 2 2020;

'While many contemporary Australian writers pitch their narratives on the coastal fringes, where most Australians reside, Nicolas Rothwell returns obsessively to the interior where one senses a sense of unfinished business. The spatial instabilities that resulted from the settler colonial project act as a catalyst for unsettling prior forms of knowledge and belief. Rothwell’s works feature real-and-imagined characters caught between fiction and non-fiction, the lies in the land and the lie of the land. His narratives create a form of generic disorientation that has a political, social and epistemological purpose. Central to Rothwell’s literary project is the reminder that spatial representations influence spatial practices. The author advocates for a break from the novelistic tradition; the country has seen enough literary and legal fictions that had catastrophic consequences for the native population and the environment.

'I argue that Rothwell’s spatial and literary renegotiations culminate in the formation of a new literary genre, the narrative essay. The author decolonises place, space and literary forms to articulate ethical models of non-belonging. Rothwell offers a transformative sublime aesthetics that I analyse as an expression of Bill Ashcroft’s ‘horizonal sublime’ and Christopher Hitt’s ‘ecological sublime’. I compare Rothwell’s ethics of representation, characterised by a self-reflexive prose, narrative instability and narrative regression, to that of Anglo-German author W.G. Sebald, who uses similar techniques in his evocation of a ruined Europe. Rothwell not only presents man’s propensity for a ‘Natural History of Destruction’, he is also intent on identifying the mechanisms at work in building the future.' (Publication abstract)

1 Tim Winton's In the Winter Dark and the Settler Condition Stephane Christophe Cordier , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , vol. 32 no. 1/2 2018; (p. 58-72)
'In discussing the creative processes that underpin his novels, Tim Winton himself identifies the importance of place: "The place comes first' If the place isn't interesting to me then I can't feel it. I can't feel any people in it. I can't feel what the people are on about or likely to get up to" (Steger). For this reason, Winton has often been perceived as a writer who champions belonging. Some critics even argue that his narratives reinforce conservative, settler-colonial attitudes to place. Jennifer Rutherford, for instance, analyzes The Riders as a narrative of belonging that seeks "to reaffirm the legitimacy of white Australian narratives of nation and to reinforce nationalist narcissism" (153). If isolated elements of a particular novel may lead to this conclusion, an analysis of Winton's oeuvre shows that, as he revisits the bush, the ocean, the littoral, the outback, the city, and the suburb, the author does not validate traditional or conservative conceptions of place. Winton may be a popular writer, but he does not allow his readers to be complacent and accept the legacy of the colonial past. For the past three decades, Winton's fiction has kept probing the contested issue of settler legitimacy. The Rider (1994), Dirt Music (2001), Breath (2008), and Eyrie (2013) explore how non-Indigenous Australians attempt to renegotiate spatial relationships in this context of social, cultural, political, and spatial instability. In a recent analysis of Winton's oeuvre, The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earth and Sacred (2016), Lyn McCredden argues that his recent novels question the "supposed stabilities of place" (11) and that "Tim Winton is the poet of non-belonging" (109). ' (Introduction)
 
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