Scenes of Reading single work   essay  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Scenes of Reading
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Scenes of reading are everywhere in Lohrey's fiction, which throughout questions what reading does to and for us. Her work explores its frustrations, disappointments, limits, and trans-formative potential. In her novels books are set by well-meaning reading groups, picked up by chance in second-hand shops or coffee tables, inherited by unwilling daughters and sons. They are hidden under the bed, stolen by ASIO, burned as instructed. And they are read for reasons ranging from duty, political education, information, boredom, desperation,  meaning, and guidance. Lohrey's interest in reading is concrete:  not only are we told that her characters are reading, why and where. In this way her work is deeply intertextual. We read over the shoulders of Lohrey's characters, with excerpts of the books they are reading. Lohrey's readers are prompted to realise the process taking place while they are encountering her work: the act of reading, we are reminded, is a singular moment in which a work takes on specific meanings for each reader.  It is both intensely private and a site of connection with other readers, writers and potential selves.' (Publication summary)
 

Notes

  • Epigraph: My grandfather was one of those working men that were common then, self-educated, autodidacts, and these men had large libraries and they read everything. They read Byron and they read Shakespeare, as well as Marx and Engels. Since he twigged that I was a bit of a reader as a small child he started giving me books, and once I went to the Catholic school he regarded it as his duty in life to act as a narrative corrective to what I was getting there ... 'I know your mother wants you to grow up a Catholic,' he said, 'but there's always two sides to a story. Now I've got a little book here by an Italian monk who was unfrocked for being a radical, and he's proved that Jesus Christ was one of i6 children and the Virgin Mary was a whore.' He didn't even say 'don't tell your mother.'  
     

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Lohrey Julieanne Lamond , Collingwood : Melbourne University Press , 2022 24426524 2022 selected work essay

    'A guide to the world of Amanda Lohrey's fiction, and a meditation on what her writing has to say about contemporary life and how we live it.

    'Amanda Lohrey is a fearless and idiosyncratic writer whose award-winning career spans four decades. Her work is experimental, political, intimate and compelling. Lohrey provides an illuminating series of readings of key preoccupations across Lohrey's body of work. From the relationship of the personal to the political, masculinity and free will, human and non-human worlds and how reading shapes us, Lohrey traces a remarkable career across the contemporary literary landscape, and provides readers with an understanding of Lohrey's bold and singular style.'  (Publication summary)

    Collingwood : Melbourne University Press , 2022
    pg. 119-137
Last amended 18 Oct 2022 09:48:26
119-137 Scenes of Readingsmall AustLit logo
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