Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Reading Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing at the Bottom of the Sea
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'In the book H.C. for Life, That Is to Say …, Jacques Derrida implores us to "imagine a reading at the bottom of the elemental sea" (29). Following on from Derrida, this essay shows how such a reading might be possible through an analysis of Brian Castro's novel Shanghai Dancing. To a large extent, the current critical literature on Castro's novel highlights how it resists traditional reading methods and practices but fails to think through how this impacts the way the critic should write about the novel. To do this, I argue that Castro's tropes and metaphors for writing—dancing, doppelgängers, phantom brothers, ghosts, the sea, typhoons, and flowers—are also metaphors and tropes for reading, which in turn demand a figurative response from the critic. The novel demands to be read as if from the bottom of the sea, which emphasizes Harold Bloom's idea that "every good reader properly desires to drown" (Anxiety of Influence, 29).'  (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Antipodes vol. 34 no. 1 June 2020 22817380 2020 periodical issue

    'Before I wrote my first book, I didn't fully understand how the "editor" really worked. In shepherding that first book to publication, I had the good fortune and excellent guidance of Helen Tartar, longtime humanities editor at Stanford University Press, underappreciated there and in a fit of downsizing, forced to relocate to Fordham University Press, where she was given the means and the opportunity to flourish, especially in her forte, working with young scholars. My book had its particular fits and starts and a bit of a challenge getting past the review board. I'll never forget sitting with Helen at a book exhibit, probably at the American Comparative Literature Association annual convention, a moment of quiet while everyone was in sessions, and figuring out the last revisions to my manuscript. It wasn't a long conversation, or a demanding one, but somehow, she was working her magic. I left that convention knowing exactly what I needed to do, and I marveled at her ability to help me figure that out. At that point, I started to know what an editor could do, to understand when writers talked about "my editor" and all that this relationship implied.' (Brenda Machosky, From the Editor, introduction)

    2020
    pg. 101-112
Last amended 2 Sep 2021 06:23:04
101-112 Reading Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing at the Bottom of the Seasmall AustLit logo Antipodes
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X