Cirrus@Austlit

'To grapple with the meaning of creative-critical writing today, it is necessary to begin
from within literature. Too often, literary critics take up a disinterested position outside
the text, which foregoes the ways in which the critic is always entangled with the text’s
meanings. Through a reading of Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows (2014), I
propose a model for how a critic might read from within a literary text. I demonstrate
how Murnane’s fiction – through the use of estrangement – entangles the reader-critic
into performing acts of extension, rather than explication. With Murnane’s fiction, a
critic must embrace – extend themselves into – a fictional landscape where “it [is]
impossible to accept that the last page of a book of fiction was any sort of boundary or
limit” (Murnane, 2014, p. 20). Such extended reading opens new possibilities for
criticism’s form.' 

(Publication abstract)

'The traditional view of theory as necessarily distinct from creativity has become increasingly unsatisfactory. In response to such dissatisfaction writers and scholars such as Maggie Nelson, Christina Sharpe, Michael Taussig, Saidiya Hartman, McKenzie Wark, Stephen Muecke, Joan Rettalack and others have introduced into the theoretical field qualities associated with creative writing – including, anecdote, memory, poetics and play. In doing so they have expanded the boundaries of what counts as theory and why. In Depression: a public feeling, literary and affect theorist Ann Cvetkovich argues for her use of memoir as a research methodology. She writes: “While I could have written a critical essay that analysed the genre [of depression memoirs], the results seemed rather predictable” (2012, p. 78). This article takes up Cvetkovitch’s desire for a mode “beyond” the predictable to argue that creativecritical writing might be better understood as a methodology than as a genre of writing. It claims the most radical aspect of the creativecritical mode is not so much the refusal of the critical/creative, nonfiction/fiction, objective/personal binaries, as what the doing of the refusal surfaces and therefore demands of the writer.' (Publication abstract)

'Creativecritical approaches to writing – inside the academy and beyond – have proliferated in recent years, with varying stylistics and aims, such as opening new vistas of meaning or expression, resisting or challenging dominant subjects/subjectivities, bringing the political toward the personal, and explicating a journey in thought (commonly within academic research writing). The politics and poetics of creativecritical writing are experimental and transgressive, and as such, creativecritical writing resists taxonomy. Yet trends and patterns have emerged within this nascent field of writing. In this creativecritical essay, I argue that spatiality in language is a key principle of creativecritical writing. By activating and reflecting upon the “intentionality” (Brentano; Merleau-Ponty) of language through literary manoeuvres of carrying over, directing, figuring and going outside, this essay moves through scenes of writing to both argue for and demonstrate these manoeuvres in creativecritical practice. Drawing forward concepts of “performative writing” and its relationship to the real, this article builds upon recent research on the haptics/sensory within writing (Prendergast; Webb) and genre-transgressing writing styles (Mathews’s “relationality”; Gibbs’s “Live Writing”). In doing so, I present a lateral view of the contemporary scene of creativecritical writing and propose that spatiality – manoeuvring in critical “space” – is a key element of this form.' 

(Publication abstract)

'A “verso” is the side of a leaf that is to be read second. British conceptual artist Cornelia Parker uses the term in her practice to show the deconstruction of everyday objects, and how “even the most insignificant things can trigger a deeper meaning” (2016). This paper uses a Calvino-inspired creativecritical approach toward archival research to explore potential “versos” in archived text. It explores this from four viewpoints: the unwritten, unread, unreadable and unwritable. This exploration is founded on a claim by Italo Calvino: “We write to give the unwritten world a chance to express itself through us” (1983). From the unwritten, this paper moves to the unread as embodied by “unreadable” programming language as verso in digital writing. The final aspects – “unreadable” and “unwritable” – focus on my attempts to read Georges Perec’s materials at the UQ Fryer Library. In August 1981, Perec was writer-in-residence in the French Department, during which he intended to write a novel in fifty-three days, titled 53 Days. My first attempt to read the materials found them “missing”. When located, the notes on offer were not sufficient to comprehend Perec’s proposed unfinished project. I therefore use “unreadable” programming language to program poetry from Perec’s archival remains to explore digital methodological approaches to contemporary creative writing.' (Publication abstract)

'Words aloud the page, aloud the dab and dash of a pen, the swish of wrist, the nib is
avatar, the ink is silent virus, moldwarp burrowing along, just beneath the surface, there
I am, trying to slip between the nib and that which would be scratched out from my
fingers, hand and arm. Trying to eke the groove of thought, its carve through language
skin. Creative and critical writing hold in tension between them a force field that is
essentially implicit and unworded. It is here that my practice-based and theoretical
research, concerned with how a contemporary poetic practice might thematically and
artistically engage with the unsaid and the unsayable, seeks to play. My focus is on
apophasis, the rhetoric of denial and negation, which since classical times has been a
means of using language to deal with what lies beyond language. Taking a braided
form, this paper reflects on the process and experience of producing a blended thesis in
order to explore, through an apophatic lens, the implications of collapsing the distance
between creative and critical modes to write into and out of the force field of un-
wordedness.' 

(Publication abstract)

'Words aloud the page, aloud the dab and dash of a pen, the swish of wrist, the nib is
avatar, the ink is silent virus, moldwarp burrowing along, just beneath the surface, there
I am, trying to slip between the nib and that which would be scratched out from my
fingers, hand and arm. Trying to eke the groove of thought, its carve through language
skin. Creative and critical writing hold in tension between them a force field that is
essentially implicit and unworded. It is here that my practice-based and theoretical
research, concerned with how a contemporary poetic practice might thematically and
artistically engage with the unsaid and the unsayable, seeks to play. My focus is on
apophasis, the rhetoric of denial and negation, which since classical times has been a
means of using language to deal with what lies beyond language. Taking a braided
form, this paper reflects on the process and experience of producing a blended thesis in
order to explore, through an apophatic lens, the implications of collapsing the distance
between creative and critical modes to write into and out of the force field of un-
wordedness.' 

(Publication abstract)

'Finding or developing an exegetical voice may be confronting for the nascent writer-
as-researcher: they must transition from undergraduate disciplinary skills and
knowledge acquisition to postgraduate research, and grapple with creative/critical
research thesis requirements. Applying the authors’ experiences supervising creative
writing research candidates through Honours and Masters research projects, and in
teaching the unit Manifestos at Deakin University, this paper will explore ways of
traversing the perceived gap between creative and critical writing to help develop a
creative/critical voice appropriate to the exegesis. To do so, this paper focuses on the
experiential or personal essay form of creative nonfiction to initially identify the
writer’s personal voice through a process of interweaving threads of the
autobiographical, data or the factual, and the universal (Huxley, 1959). A writer’s
manifesto, composed as part of a research program, then enables emerging writer-as-
researchers to consolidate that voice as a bridge to writing their exegesis. Bringing
together these aspects of writerly voice may lead to a complex exegetical pattern as a
response to the tensions between the creative and critical in research: something like
the braid this paper attempts to emulate in its structure. This paper argues that the
exegesis is an experiment in voice balancing fragmentation and cohesion with a
manifesto-style belief in the writing process, and creative responses to theory as
rigorous approaches to research.' 

(Publication abstract)

'“The Island of Brazil” offers a critique of nationalist historical and spatial mythologies by drawing on the agility and flexibility of creativecritical methods. Operating at the intersection of fictocriticism, memoir and travel writing, the essay is both an extension of the author’s previous writing on South America and a journey into the unknown. This entangled mixture is not [just] an aesthetic exercise; rather, the interwoven analysis, description and narration reflect the author’s concern with transnational histories of colonisation – specifically, those analogous forms and metaphorical resonances which have otherwise been separated by modern, nationalist histories and their restricted vistas of representation. “The Island of Brazil” proposes an antithesis of Australian conquest by recalling a neglected lineage of Australian poetics – here represented by Patrick White’s Voss, a novel that is emblematic of colonialist literature but, in its complexity, contradictions and expressionism, powerfully subverts many colonialist tropes. Like Voss, “The Island of Brazil” revives baroque, counter-modern strategies by constructing a series of coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) and discordia concors (a combination of dissimilar images, or even the discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike). Accordingly, vast distances and times are collapsed or overlaid. After all, Australia once had its own Amazon: millions of years ago, nourished by frequent rain and great webs of rivers, a rainforest of similar size spread throughout the centre of the continent. As Australia dried out, however, rainfall over central Brazil increased, and what vanished in one place re-emerged somewhere else. The essay suggests, therefore, that what we might have assumed is unique to Australia is not so unique after all; going further, Australia, like Brazil, might not be anywhere at all. In these lands that are not ours, the sacred is immanent to matter and its obscure forces, but the divine lies only in the half-seen images of dream. The author’s account, if not his entire subjectivity, must explode into myriad fragments, then, but in each fragment are labyrinths of biology, cryptography and geology; the crisis of sensory experience goes hand in hand with unending series of remarkable discoveries. Beings badly awakened from their flesh, travellers merge with fiction, and the fictions of the past; Voss sets out to find the Outback but loses himself in the Amazon.' 

(Publication abstract)