Valerie-anne Belleflamme Valerie-anne Belleflamme i(9221459 works by)
Gender: Female
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.

Works By

Preview all
1 'Moving on Metaphorical Silk Roads of Intellectual Trade' : Chinese Aesthetics in Five Bells Valerie-anne Belleflamme , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Inner and Outer Worlds : Gail Jones' Fiction 2022;
1 Looking at Gail Jones’s “The Man in the Moon” in Aestheticized Darkness Valerie-anne Belleflamme , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 45 no. 1 2021; (p. 33-45)

'When the first astronauts landed on the moon, they left unfading bootprints on its surface, testifying to our human violation of its aesthetic and symbolic autonomy. Starting from the premise that this lunar invasion has forever scarred the moon, making it a carrier of loss and an embodiment of grief, my article seeks to examine how Gail Jones, in her own fiction, aestheticizes the starry night sky in order to bring together the astronauts’ human disfiguration of the moon’s face with the human figuration by writers and artists of this very defacement. Through art’s redemptive function in the face of loss and destruction, I argue, Jones has found a way to reinstate a sense of the moon’s autonomy. In particular, this article will focus on how her short story “The Man in the Moon” addresses the possibility of creating alternative cosmologies through art. Both her essay “Without Stars”, which discusses Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster to investigate the metaphysics of suffering and the poetics of grief, and her essay “Five Meditations on a Moonlit Night”, which looks at nature writing to examine the aesthetics of grief and the ethics of the gift, will form the backdrop of this exploration.' (Introduction)

1 'Shakespeare Was Wrong' : Counter-discursive Intertextuality in Gail Jones’s Sorry Valerie-anne Belleflamme , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing , vol. 51 no. 6 2015; (p. 661-671)
'In what is presented as a moment of truth in Gail Jones’s novel Sorry, the narrator’s brief statement that “Shakespeare was wrong” appears to call into question the English dramatist’s literary and epistemological supremacy. Starting from this unsettling premise, this article seeks to define Jones’s counter-discursive use of Shakespearean intertextuality. While it has, for decades, proved a risky task for both historians and novelists to write about the delicate issue of silence in Australia without risking the appropriation of an Aboriginal voice, the article examines how Jones exploits defamiliarizing techniques in order to undermine the dominant European discourse (as encoded in the Shakespearean text) without assuming an Aboriginal perspective. Her aim is to facilitate the emergence of an incipient, tentatively defined counter-discourse sufficiently attuned to the specific realities of Australia. The article argues that by adopting an Australian cultural perspective designed to decentre Shakespeare, Jones hopes to reconcile history and writing, and also the divided aspects of White Australia’s twofold identity at a time of profound national changes.' (Source: Abstract)
X