y separately published work icon New Scholar periodical issue  
Alternative title: Australian Literature : The Road Ahead
Issue Details: First known date: 2014... vol. 3 no. 2 2014 of New Scholar est. 2011 New Scholar
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Contents

* Contents derived from the , 2014 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Australian Literature : Gathering Reflections on the Reads Ahead, Toby Davidson , Michael Austin , single work criticism

'This special issue of New Scholar originates from a 2013 conference of the same name held at Macquarie University, convened by the Macquarie University English Department. The conference explicitly sought to examine trends, manifestations and solidifications in Australian writing and modes of analysis which might reveal both new research frontiers and new scholars pursuing twenty-first century approaches to movement, temporality, spatiality, canonicity and

the cross-cultural transference of values and identities. As the conference progressed, the focus on signposting or predicting future Australian literary trends and representations began to be superseded by the contested spaces of ‘the road,’ particularly as a space of contested readings and contests between ways of reading. The word ‘road’ itself etymologically invites this, and the Call for Papers included a reminder of its Old English root rād, with its parallel meanings ‘expedition,’ ‘raid’ and later an ‘open way between two places’ as conducive to postcolonial and transnational considerations. The road has often meant a vital, torrid testing ground for Australian self-definition and annihilation, and as guest editors we were particularly impressed with how the essays to follow took this trope in fiercely independent directions. ' (Author's introduction)
The Sydney Language : William Dawes in Australian Literature, Belinda Castles , single work criticism
'Familiar images of Sydney, displaying its sparkling harbour, opera house and bridge, belie the darkness of its short history. For Delia Falconer, in her recent ‘biography’ of Sydney, the city’s ‘fundamental temperament is melancholy’ (2). Over two hundred years of European settlement have brought countless tales of grim encounters in quiet alleys, graves found in the bush, bodies bobbing to the surface of rivers. And there is an older shock, hidden in the landscape, the sudden, calamitous arrival of an alien civilisation. ' (Author's introduction)
The Synchronous City : Aural Geographies in Gail Jones's Five Bells, Ella Mudie , single work criticism
'A key 'road ahead' in Australian literature resides in the prominence of spatial narratives that interrogate the manifold ways in which heterogeneous cultural identities and histories converge on common terrain. This essay considers Gail Jones's fifth novel Five Bells (2011) as an 'acoustical novel' in which embodied experiences of sound catalyse a spectral form of remembering that unsettles the boundaries of self and cultural identity. In particular, I identify three operative models of sound in the novel; sound as revenant, listening as vital to the appropriation and production of space, and aural modes of trauma recall, arguing that each develops the ongoing concerns of Jones's fiction in new ways. From registering synchronicities in traumatic events which permeate geographical borders in a globalised world to reinstating the body-in-space within a zone of potential encounters, the embodied response to sound emerges as pivotal to the 'spatial practice' of the novel concerned with the potential for imaginative labour to more actively implicate the subject within the spaces of everyday life. ' (Publication abstract)
Sacred Pathways : Metaphor and the Sacred in the Poetry of Les Murray, Kirsten Lamb , single work criticism

'The sacred, as understood in the Christian religion and as reflected in work by poets of that persuasion, is manifested as a ‘presence’ which transcends our reality and which surpasses language. That this sacred presence can be conveyed and experienced through poetry relies on two assumptions: firstly, of God's real presence or ‘absent presence,’ and secondly, that the aesthetic is a means by which God's presence can be experienced.

The poetry of Les Murray reflects his exploration of the sacred within his Christian (more specifically Roman Catholic) tradition. In this task, metaphor is both the means by which he articulates the sacred, its elusive presence and absence, and the pathway that can lead the reader to encountering it. This navigation is a journey in which the poet must pass beyond and around the obstacles of language: the inherited established metaphors that bind the poet and his work to reality, handicapping the sacred experience; and language itself that weighs on us all, leading us to use words that are never quite our own, confining us to already-established and thus assumed ways of speaking and seeing the world. ' (Publication abstract)
Rising from the Ashes: The Reimagining of Australian Identity through Islam in Eva Sallis’ Hiam, Erin Claringbold , single work criticism
'This paper analyses how 'the road' is used in Eva Sallis' novel Hiam (1998) to mobilise Islamic spirituality in the Australian outback and challenge traditional concepts of Australian nationhood based upon colonial ideologies of self and place. Sallis' novel uses the road as a political site of contestation and ideological decolonization wherein these concepts are dissembled and reconstructed. An alternative vision of Australian national identity is proposed through the protagonist's, Hiam's, journey - one requiring self-immolation and rebirth, free of colonialism's ideological legacies which are challenged in the distorting landscape of the desert and the undulating road that disintegrates as quickly as it unfurls. Islamic spirituality acts as a framework for this new identity model, represented as a force capable of embracing infinite subjectivities and ideologies without privilege - allowing Hiam to experience a way of being (and being in place) that is open, inclusive and in an endless, perpetual state of flux. The road is central to this de- and re- construction, acting both as a political site of agency and power, and as a site upon which various histories converge to be acknowledged, contested, challenged and empowered.' (Publication abstract)
A Flâneur in the Outback : Walking and Writing Frontier in Central Australia, Glenn Morrison , single work criticism

'While Frederick Turner's envisioning of the frontier remains pervasive in representations of Australian postcolonial geographies and constructions of national identity, recent anthropological evidence suggests more nuanced 'lifeworlds' may better approximate the lived experience of 'frontier' towns such as Alice Springs, in Central Australia.

'This paper reimagines Baudelaire's flâneur to examine two walking narratives from the region. The analysis reveals at least two levels of produced space prevailing in Alice Springs, with many other imagined spaces imbricated in a more complex political geography than Turner's frontier might explain. The paper aims to alert writers and journalists to recent shifts in anthropology, leading hopefully to more nuanced representations of Australian postcolonial geographies.

'The first text is a Central Australian Aboriginal Dreaming narrative called 'A Man from the Dreamtime,' a traditional Kaytetye story. Kaytetye elder Tommy Kngwarraye Thompson told the story to anthropologist Myfany Turpin as part of a collection published as Growing Up Kaytetye (2003). The second is one (walking) chapter from a recent narrative of political geography and memoir by Eleanor Hogan entitled Alice Springs (2012).' (Publication summary)
Walking Parramatta Road : Reading the City Street in Anthony Macris' Great Western Highway, Julian Murphy , single work criticism
J. M. Coetzee, R. G. Howarth, South to South, Nicholas Jose , single work criticism

'R. G. (Guy) Howarth (1906-74) was a poet, scholar, teacher and advocate for Australian literature. He was foundation editor of Southerly from 1939 to 1956. From 1955 to 1971 he was Arderne Professor of English Literature in the University of Cape Town, a position he accepted after he was passed over for the prestigious Challis Chair at Sydney University in a disappointment that stayed with him to his premature end.

'In Cape Town Howarth continued his research on English and Australian literature, and began to teach South African writing. In 'Sisters of the South' (1958) he made a case for comparing Australian, New Zealand and South African literature. He introduced a course called Imaginative Writing which J.M. Coetzee took as a student. In Youth (2002), Coetzee's protagonist remembers: 'Howarth, who is an Australian, seems to have taken a liking to him, he cannot see why.' Howarth introduced Coetzee and other UCT students to Australian writers. He encouraged Coetzee to approach Prof Joseph Jones at the University of Texas at Austin about graduate study. Today Coetzee's archive sits with both Howarth's and Jones's in the Harry Ransom Center at UTA.

'Jones saw in Howarth the avatar of 'a new-type literary historian' who would be polymathically able to approach 'all literature in English-as a reticulated if not yet wholly integrated world-phenomenon'. For Coetzee, Howarth is an example of a teacher who 'may not have much of inherent significance to convey' yet can still 'exert a shaping influence on his students'. This long legacy re-opens the question of what happened in Sydney in 1951 where a road blocked for Howarth became a road ahead elsewhere.' (Publication abstract)
Places Without a Place : New Possibilities for 'Airport Fiction', Tony Davis , single work criticism
'International flight provides a strange paradox: the modern jet passenger is plied with food and alcohol as if special, yet checked, monitored and identified as if a criminal. A long haul trip involves passing over time zones and countries (and borders and sovereignty), out of sync with day and night, and for much of the time without agency (literally belted into place, denied the usual electronic props of telephone and Internet). It is a place, or perhaps a non-place as defined by Marc Augé, ruled by the tension of being effectively guilty until you can demonstrate yourself innocent. Michel Foucault cited the boat or ship - 'a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea' - as the 'heterotopia par excellence.' This paper argues that the modern jetliner is an even more intense heterotopia, further disorienting with speed and the blurring of borders and time zones (also creating what Foucault calls a heterochrony, or slice of time that is often linked to a heterotopy). This paper further argues the metastable space entered at an airport and beyond (Fuller and Harley 5) provides untapped possibilities in fiction - and supports this argument with extracts from an extended short story/ novella by Tony Davis set entirely within a trip from Sydney to Zurich.' (Publication abstract)
Verse Novel Research and Reception in the Twenty-first Century, Linda Weste , single work criticism
'Given the unique complement of poetic and narrative elements in each verse novel, the form should have considerable research appeal. Yet despite the verse novel's potential, the form is often deemed problematic by scholars and reviewers alike. A range of interrelated factors appear to complicate, marginalise or problematise critical debate on the form. This paper appraises how past and present reading practices, taxonomic classifications, the relation between the verse novel and its novelistic counterpart, and the conflation of lyric and poetry as terms, impact on verse novel research and reception. Some recuperative acts are proposed for the direction of future research by which scholars can close the gaps in verse novel research, and critics and readers can better regard the verse novel form.' (Publication abstract)
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