Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 Paratactic Stammers : Temporality in the Novels of Gail Jones
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.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Norman Saadi Nikro’s essay, ‘Paractatic Stammers: Temporality in the Novels of Gail Jones,’ sets out to explore how Jones’ ‘sense of fascination and wonder with the technology and culture of modernism informs the phenomenology and tenor of her novelistic style, especially the characters that emerge through the wave lengths of this style.’ Addressing himself to Jones’ literary fiction published to date, Nikro seeks to ‘track the duration in her novels whereby memory, history and story are experienced by her characters as something like intersections, intervals nor spacings, taut and tense folds or pleats in which time is riven by “a strange accession to memory and speech,” as the character Perdita comes to learn in Jones’s Sorry (202).’ Drawing in part on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and on Gilles Deleuze’s ‘engagement with the work of Bergson,’ Nikro examines in Jones the ‘relational contiguity of parts whose variable movements and orientations to one another bring about a transfiguration of their subjective capacities (as in Perdita’s realisation of her stuttering as a relational dynamic).’ ‘Paractatic Stammers: Temporality in the Novels of Gail Jones,’ offers a rich and original reading of Jones’ fiction, both sympathetic and critically rigorous. Echoing Jones’ own views on modernity, Nikro traces in her novels a poetics of modernity that inflects both the writing and the thematics of the work. ‘Jones’s prose style,’ he suggests, ‘what she calls “a kind of prose poetics’” (Royo Grasa 1), calls attention to the gaps and intervals by which the temporality of narration is not only possible, but rendered a vacant site for the stammer of an interruptive image or voice encompassing an alternative engagement of time and its graphic imprints.’ Like Kirkpatrick, Nikro too highlights the forceful way in which an Australian author develops a distinct narrative voice, in the case of Jones one informed by a constant intertwining of local and global aesthetic and political sensibilities.' (Editor's introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon JASAL Unsettled and Unsettling : Negotiating Reconciliation, Recognition, Reparation vol. 16 no. 1 2016 9691798 2016 periodical issue 2016
Last amended 5 Aug 2016 12:58:36
https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/10901/10566 Paratactic Stammers : Temporality in the Novels of Gail Jonessmall AustLit logo JASAL
Subjects:
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X