Cirrus@Austlit

'Over the past decade much discussion has, by necessity due to the positioning of creative writing practice within academia, focused on strategising the creative arts product – e.g. the poem or short story – into the paradigm of research value as non-traditional research output. Meanwhile, the form of the journal article – in all its monolithic history – has also undergone shifts and challenges, the fictocritical mode arguably making the most incisive impact. Nevertheless, the science-rhetoric form of the scholarly paper is still taken as granted (even as hallowed). But as the packaging of knowledge undergoes a technological transition in the 21st century, is the radical journal article already in the making? And is creative writing the discipline in the box seat for exploring and exploiting new, flexible and dynamic knowledge forms? This paper aims to invigorate discussion around the possibilities of how a scholarly paper could and should one day be written and read.' (Publication abstract)

'The doctorate in Creative Writing in Australian universities legitimates itself in the academic context with an exegetical component that seeks to translate creative endeavours into acceptable research-speak in order to be measured, funded and sanctioned. However in many of my doctoral students’ work, the exegesis has become fictively playful to such an extent that it is almost indistinguishable from the creative artefact it seeks to legitimate. Conversely, in other works, the creative artefact performs an exegetical function. Using epigraphs from interviews with JM Coetzee as prompts, this paper explores various student works in which the boundaries between artefact and exegesis have become blurred. ' (Publication abstract)

'While the biographical novel has created an openness to representing lives in fiction it is usually expected to provide a disclaimer certifying the work’s unreliability despite its potential for truth-telling and rich tools for writers wishing to tell the stories of real people. Even so, more serious attention to the historical novel since Lukács, the impact of the postmodern novel, plus the variety of published works that have adopted fictional strategies to tell lives over the last half century suggest this perspective is shifting. Using Ina Schabert’s seminal work on fictional biography as a scholarly reference point, this paper explores fiction’s biographical capacity, turning to published works and personal writing practice to try to reappraise the potential of fiction as a mode of biography.' (Publication abstract)

'While writing my PhD thesis about the concept of closure in literature, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a usually curable type of cancer that, in my case, has nonetheless developed into a dire prognosis. In this paper I weave literary theory with personal memoir as I attempt to make sense of my life and its possible ending. Fiction helps to make sense of the world by reflecting it and imbuing the reflection with structure and meaning, However, this reflection is illusory, and we face a world far less certain in which we must make meaning for ourselves.' (Publication abstract)

'In 2012, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries aired as a web series adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The series of YouTube videos was supplemented by various social media platforms, including Twitter, Tumblr and Google+, and was awarded an Emmy for Best Original Interactive Program in 2013. Since then, there has been a swift rise in classic novels adapted through social media platforms online. These webseries have made use of multi-platform storytelling strategies with varying degrees of success. As a relatively new method of storytelling, transmedia narratives have yet to invite the equivalent academic scrutiny of traditional media like novels, television shows and films. Creative producers employ strategies that create an illusion of reality, or a Cartesian dream, which facilitates an ‘engagement aesthetic’ and allows viewers to immerse themselves in the narrative. Viewers approach characters and situations on the internet as if they are ‘real’ because, in the online space, ‘reality’ is a construction of the user.' (Publication abstract)

'Using Genette’s notions of text and paratext and Raymond Williams’ notion of ordinary culture, this paper explores the ways in which institutions reward reading efforts that value only the reading of books, and thus marginalise readers and writers of other forms of text and of paratext. Though book reading continues to be valuable, the tools with which reading is measured needs to be inclusive of all reading platforms reflective of 21st century culture. This paper will use the examples of class reading logs and their template designs, the New South Wales Premier’s Reading Challenge, public library selection, readers’ advisory practices and summer reading clubs to explore how institutions that promote reading can devalue the pleasure reading choices of some children. These institutional practices can act as a deterrent to reading and may prevent children from identifying as ‘readers’ and perceiving these institutions as relevant to their reading experiences. Cultural and educational institutions need to be current and inclusive in their approaches to literacy, readers and writers.' (Publication abstract)

'Consistent with ongoing efforts to improve the transition of students to university, this article conceptualises the general academic writing classroom as a potentially complex but productive pedagogic space. Those who design and deliver curricula in academic writing face particular challenges around translating into practice two principles that are foundational to transitional students’ experience: inclusion and engagement. This article presents food studies as a rich interdisciplinary resource for those who strive to construct an inclusive and stimulating learning environment for transitional students of academic writing. It draws on experience in designing and delivering a first-year unit that develops general academic writing skills and involves scaffolded written assessments tasks culminating in the research-based essay. Because such units are taken by students from a range of disciplines, a specific challenge in setting questions for written assessment tasks is to engage all students in such ways that learning experiences are relevant, inclusive and motivating. Questions on food and drink provide common ground for students, and stimulate engagement and inquiry. Supporting and contextualising this argument is scholarship from higher education studies, and scholarship that defines and describes the characteristics of food studies as a field of enquiry. The article extends a body of scholarship, well represented in TEXT, on the synergetic relation between food and writing, and writing pedagogy.'

'Just as absence mobilises the linguistic sign, so the felt experience of absence, through personal loss on the part of the writer, mobilises writing. While each of these ideas has been well-documented separately within their respective literatures, the fact of their correspondence, and its implications for the thinking of absence within creative writing studies, warrants further discussion. Engaging with the work of select thinkers within semiotics, literary philosophy, and psychology, this paper examines the operations of the analogous movement between the operations of the linguistic sign as a structure motivated by absence, and the phenomenon of generative loss in the experience of creative writers. Throughout, it draws from Roland Barthes’s elegiac meditations on literature, loss and writing following the death of his mother, in Mourning Diary (2009). This paper suggests that just as writers are mobilised by absence to write, so do they in turn self-consciously mobilise the narrative and aesthetic powers of absence for their own literary ends. Interrogating the relations between these movements offers a means toward further understanding the particular aesthetic force of much elegiac literature, as it bears on our motivations, processes and felt experiences as writers and readers.' (Publication summary)

'A brief history of a prescriptive English language discipline known as English Prime (E-Prime), a method of writing without use of the copula (the verb to be). Writing in E-Prime requires the author to expose the agent of a sentence and therefore lends itself favourably to other techniques of mimetic storytelling. An examination of my experiments using this constraint for creative writing demonstrates that utilising E-Prime enhances vernacular authenticity, improves clarity, readability and the quality of immersion in a text. The E-Prime constraint offers access to dynamics of language ordinarily subliminal.' (Publication abstract)