'This book rewrites the history of Australian literature as the rough beginnings of a new literacy. Farrell's investigations of the colonial, material page begins with Bennelong's letter of 1796, and continues through bushranger Ned Kelly's famous Jerilderie letter, Jong's Chinese-Australian phrase-chains, Harpur's proto prose poem, Dorothea Mackellar's coded diaries, Christopher Brennan-does-Mallarmé (and collage), and ends with Mary Fullerton's quotation game "Bromide." Here you will find songs, letters and visual poems by Indigenous farmers and stockmen, the unpunctuated journals of early settler women, drover tree-messages and carved clubs, and a meta-commentary on settlement from Moore River (the place escaped from in The Rabbit-Proof Fence). The book borrows the figure of the assemblage to suggest the active and revisable nature of Australian writing, arguing against the "settling" effects of its prior editors, anthologists and historians. It resists offering a new canon, but offers instead an unsettled space in which to rethink Australian writing.' (Publication summary)
Contents:
– Introduction
– The hunted writer
– An Australian poetics of the plough
– Unnecessary inventions
– Open secrets
– Boredom
– Unsettling the field
– Writing to order
– Homelessness
– Conclusion.
Unsettlement : A New Reading of Australian Poetics
Melbourne
:
2012
Z1924657
2012
single work
thesis
'This is a thesis that takes the notion of 'unsettlement' in opposition to the settlement of English literature in Australia, and reads a number of remarkable colonial texts in this light. This is not a review of texts critical of settlement, such as may be found in Henry Lawson and others, though I do examine texts by canonical writers such as Charles Harpur and Dorothea Mackellar. I take Philip Mead's argument for a contemporary unsettlement of Australian literature as my starting point: in order to demonstrate the historical beginnings and resources of such unsettlement. Settlement literature is embodied in national anthologies - and more than one of my case study texts comes from such anthologies. Many of the texts derive from the life-writing genres of letters and diaries; I also consider a poem, a note, songs, a game, drawings, letters inscribed on clubs, and messages left on trees and water tanks. The texts are written by Indigenous, Chinese, and Anglo-Celtic Australians; their writers practise a range of literacies. The very broadening of the terms of literature that allows the inclusion of texts such as Ned Kelly's The Jerilderie Letter and Bennelong's 'Letter to Mr Philips', means a shift in focus to historical significance: I focus on the nature of the poetics of these texts. My emphasis is therefore on the constitution of individual texts as such: their grammar, punctuation, visuality and materiality. The key concept I employ is borrowed from French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - that of assemblage — and I ask how these unusual assemblages work to disassemble settlement. In reading the punctuation, I also adapt Roland Barthes's theory of the punctum. Other key terms are deployed as necessary on a case-by-case basis (such as the neobaroque, in the final chapter).
'William Blake’s articulation of the ‘bounding line’ as ‘the great and golden rule of art, as well as of life’ may seem a far-fetched place to start an examination of the poetics of the fence in Australian poetry. The line’s cosmic necessity and ethical force were being asserted by Blake in the context of a long-running dispute amongst art theorists as to whether outline or colour was the predominant element in the pictorial arts. But my mind reverts to this quotation when thinking about the cathected attitude to lines, boundaries, and fences that is emblematic of the settler-colonial establishment in this country in both its agrarian and suburban contexts.' (Introduction)
'There has been a rich history of anthologising Australian poetry this far into the twenty-first century. This article claims that contemporary poetics, with a renewed focus on the recoprocal relation between cultural and linguistic inquiry, can rediscover alternative ways of reading the history of Australian avant-garde, inventive and experimental work. Considering several key anthologies published after the turn of last century, the article provides readings of both the frameworks the anthology-makers provide and the poems themselves, claiming that mark, trace and lexical segmentivities can already be read as social. It then proposes a new possibility for an experimental anthology that might bring these facets into lived praxis: the chrestomathy.' (Publication abstract)
'That poetry is implicated with politics is incontrovertible. As Theodore Adorno writes ‘art exists in the real world and has a function in it, and the two are connected by a large number of mediating links.’ Those mediating links however, the things that connect each to the other, are harder to grapple with. What does the daily life of a protest poet look like compared to a conservative one when both work in a modern university? What poetry does the politician read?' (Introduction)
'In this significant critical work, Michael Farrell offers up a dialectical method (not announced as such), which I daresay is not unworthy of such a one as Lionel Trilling. In chapter 1, "The Hunted Writer," Farrell provides a bracing reading of unsettlement through both The Jerilderie Letter by Ned Kelly—"the notorious bushranger" (I1)—and also Bennelong's "Letter to Lord Mr Philips, Lord Sidney's Steward." By pairing these particular texts—so historically fecund as regards the discursivity of settler-hunter (Kelly) vis-à-vis Indigenous travel (Bennelong)—in a poetics of unsettlement, Farrell maintains that "these two colonial writers were participants, as both protagonists and victims" (13). The integrity of Farrell's readings stands on their own merits: there is no need to "pun"—for Farrell has already criticized others for exploiting the "affective, punning quality" of the word "unsettlement" (7)—to tell us that that the protagonist/victim synchronicity that Kelly and Bennelong apparently sham is an "unsettling fact" (13) that informs Farrell's readings. Indeed, to unsettle so iconic a figure as Kelly is not just a dialectic but also a dialogue among genres: cinematically, as Farrell points out, Kelly has been played on film "by both Mick Jagger and Heath Ledger," while culinarily Kelly's "image is used to sell pork in Castlemaine" (13). (Introduction)
' (Introduction)
'That poetry is implicated with politics is incontrovertible. As Theodore Adorno writes ‘art exists in the real world and has a function in it, and the two are connected by a large number of mediating links.’ Those mediating links however, the things that connect each to the other, are harder to grapple with. What does the daily life of a protest poet look like compared to a conservative one when both work in a modern university? What poetry does the politician read?' (Introduction)
'There has been a rich history of anthologising Australian poetry this far into the twenty-first century. This article claims that contemporary poetics, with a renewed focus on the recoprocal relation between cultural and linguistic inquiry, can rediscover alternative ways of reading the history of Australian avant-garde, inventive and experimental work. Considering several key anthologies published after the turn of last century, the article provides readings of both the frameworks the anthology-makers provide and the poems themselves, claiming that mark, trace and lexical segmentivities can already be read as social. It then proposes a new possibility for an experimental anthology that might bring these facets into lived praxis: the chrestomathy.' (Publication abstract)
'William Blake’s articulation of the ‘bounding line’ as ‘the great and golden rule of art, as well as of life’ may seem a far-fetched place to start an examination of the poetics of the fence in Australian poetry. The line’s cosmic necessity and ethical force were being asserted by Blake in the context of a long-running dispute amongst art theorists as to whether outline or colour was the predominant element in the pictorial arts. But my mind reverts to this quotation when thinking about the cathected attitude to lines, boundaries, and fences that is emblematic of the settler-colonial establishment in this country in both its agrarian and suburban contexts.' (Introduction)
