Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 Looking at Gail Jones’s “The Man in the Moon” in Aestheticized Darkness
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'When the first astronauts landed on the moon, they left unfading bootprints on its surface, testifying to our human violation of its aesthetic and symbolic autonomy. Starting from the premise that this lunar invasion has forever scarred the moon, making it a carrier of loss and an embodiment of grief, my article seeks to examine how Gail Jones, in her own fiction, aestheticizes the starry night sky in order to bring together the astronauts’ human disfiguration of the moon’s face with the human figuration by writers and artists of this very defacement. Through art’s redemptive function in the face of loss and destruction, I argue, Jones has found a way to reinstate a sense of the moon’s autonomy. In particular, this article will focus on how her short story “The Man in the Moon” addresses the possibility of creating alternative cosmologies through art. Both her essay “Without Stars”, which discusses Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster to investigate the metaphysics of suffering and the poetics of grief, and her essay “Five Meditations on a Moonlit Night”, which looks at nature writing to examine the aesthetics of grief and the ethics of the gift, will form the backdrop of this exploration.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Journal of Australian Studies vol. 45 no. 1 2021 21480491 2021 periodical issue

    'Our first issue of 2021 brings with it the charge of a new year, a ticking over of the clock from the now infamous 2020. For many, this year is already no easier than the last, and the challenges of the pandemic continue for our global community. Despite this, there is always change in the wind. As we write this editorial, US President Trump’s last days in office signal a potential reset of the cooperative international relations required to address the other global threat somewhat overshadowed by the virus—the unfolding climate crisis—and La Niña has a hold on the weather patterns of the Australian continent, forestalling the catastrophic bushfires we saw last year, bringing with it much-needed rain across parts of the country. This collection of articles includes engagements with both climate crisis and Australian landscapes and regions, and takes us into diverse imaginative and poetic environments through a range of textual and historical explorations of Australian cultural life.' (Emily Potter, Brigid Magner : Land, Sky, Identity and Myth: Making and Unmaking Australian Imaginaries Editorial introduction)

    2021
    pg. 33-45
Last amended 7 Apr 2021 12:50:59
33-45 Looking at Gail Jones’s “The Man in the Moon” in Aestheticized Darknesssmall AustLit logo Journal of Australian Studies
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