Marie Herbillon Marie Herbillon i(A133394 works by)
Gender: Female
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1 Rewriting Dostoevsky : J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg and the Perverted Truths of Biographical Fiction Marie Herbillon , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature , September vol. 55 no. 3 2020; (p. 391–405)

'In The Master of Petersburg, J. M. Coetzee gives pride of place to a tutelary figure of the Western novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky, opening up a dialogue with the latter’s life and work. If many aspects of Dostoevsky’s life are recognizable, Coetzee deliberately departs from biographical fact in important regards. He also engages with well-known Dostoevskian narratives, in particular The Possessed, a censored section of which is reworked in his own novel. This article examines how The Master of Petersburg can be read not only as a reflection on biological and literary filiation, but also as a critique of censorship and as a meditation on writing conceived as a liminal space that tends to erode the boundary line between the private and the public. Intimate though it may be, the act of writing is indeed likely to involve a betrayal of privacy — a necessary perversion of auto/biography seeking to achieve superior forms of truth through imaginative literature. This essay also argues that the conception of history Coetzee deploys may be influenced by his status as a postcolonial writer. Just as The Possessed was intended as an attack on those aiming for the radical destruction of old world orders and other historical legacies, so The Master of Petersburg can be approached as Coetzee’s own manifesto against nihilism and as a plea for a view of history as a transformative process — one that transcends binary oppositions in order to produce integrative discourses and epistemologies, instead of positing fathers against sons as foes in endless generational and colonial conflicts.' (Publication abstract)

1 Absent Others : Asian-Australian Discontinuities in Michelle de Kretser's 'The Lost Dog' Marie Herbillon , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth : Essays and Studies , Autumn vol. 41 no. 1 2018; (p. 43-52)

'This article relies on the tropes of trauma and gothic haunting to examine Michelle de Kretser's 'The Lost Dog' (2007), in which the protagonist's discarded Indianness allegorically parallels Australia's unwillingness to confront the ghosts of its past. As the novel and its critique of settler culture seem to suggest, the Australian nation should arguably develop alternative cultural paradigms that seek to accommodate both otherness and the most unwelcome aspects of its history, instead of repressing them.' (Publication abstract)

 

1 Remapping Australia : Murray Bail's New Topographies of the Self in the 'Notebooks' Marie Herbillon , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies , Spring vol. 40 no. 2 2018; (p. 9-22)

'The Australian writer Murray Bail's 'Notebooks' feature a change of stance that interrogates the self-place relationship: initially dominated by an ideal of placelessness, they then seek to forge new bonds with a reimagined homeland. This essay examines the political implications of this paradigmatic shift. Arguably, the sense of identity that finds expression in this unconventional autobiography depends, in part, on a radical reconceptualisation of the Australian space.' (Publication abstract)

 

1 A Piano Made in Australia : Reinventing an Emblem of Cultural Wealth in Murray Bail's The Voyage Marie Herbillon , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , December vol. 31 no. 2 2017; (p. 361-373)

'[...]it is a conversation about Australia that exposes the sense of cultural superiority of the "ridiculously over-confident" (53) "Bertolt Brecht lookalike" (48; see also 94) and opposes it to Delage's own lack of self-confidence (exemplified, in the first place, by "his surprise" at being asked about his native countr y; 92). [...]the critic is more interested in Australia's natural stereotypes than in its architectural icons, which implies that, in his view, nature easily outweighs culture on the antipodean continent: "he only wanted to know about the dangerous spiders and sharks that infested Australia, and the snakes, how lethal were they really" (92); for him, the Sydney Opera House, which Delage's personal complex of secondarity leads him to consider "provincial" (70), is simply "typical of the New World['s]" preference for "appearance over substance" (92), while Delage is, for his part, tempted to think that it is precisely his piano's "appearance . . . [that] had shifted attention from the technical improvements hidden beneath the lid" (148). According to Eileen Battersby, Bail's "concise in scale" but "vastly thought-provoking novel" contains "some inspired nods to the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard's final [sic] novel, Woodcutters" (1984), which offers an über-critical portrayal of a "cannibalistic city" seemingly graced with a propensity for dragging the higher reaches of its "ap- palling society" (Bernhard 34) into what Bernhard describes as an insufferable "social hell" (4)-thereby subverting the values of this cultural elite from within since he8 was, up to a certain point, part of the same "artistic coterie" (Bernhard 84). [...]the Australian creator's own ongoing subservience to Western standards (despite Europe's enduringly paternalistic and misplaced assumptions of cultural superiority) is presented as his or her predicament.'  (Publication abstract)

1 Twisting the Australian Realist Short Story : Murray Bail’s “Camouflage” Marie Herbillon , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing , vol. 54 no. 1 2017; (p. 83-94)

'Although the short story is regarded as a minor genre in many literary traditions, it is arguably a major one in Australian literature, which, more specifically, was long dominated by the realist short story. Deriving from the colonial “yarns”, the so-called “hard-luck stories” were indeed felt to be characterized by a realism that was in turn seen to result from the archetypal dryness of Australia itself. While the contemporary Australian writer Murray Bail has repeatedly questioned the realistic quality of his homeland’s literature, he has also sought to broaden the subgenre to which it has often been reduced, namely bush realism. With “Camouflage” (1998), Bail appropriates the hard-luck story to convey a marginal perspective. This article shows how this strategy of revision allows him to contest both the archetypality of bush realism and the stereotypical perceptions of the Australian landscape, thereby problematizing the highly controversial relationship between place and literature.'  (Publication abstract)

1 “Towards an Australian Philosophy: Constructive Appropriation of Enlightenment Thinking in Murray Bail’s The Pages” Marie Herbillon , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Gateways and Walls : Under Construction 2016;
1 Writing Space in the Plural : New Australian Geographies in Murray Bail’s Fiction Marie Herbillon , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of the European Association for Studies on Australia , vol. 7 no. 2 2016; (p. 41-57)
'Like other postcolonial writers, the contemporary author Murray Bail has manifested a persistent concern with the relationship between the notion of place, which has thematically dominated Australian literature since its inception, and the issue of cultural identity at large. In the footsteps of Patrick White, his literary mentor, Bail has, in particular, repeatedly sought to dispel the so-called myth of the Great Australian Emptiness and the various cultural stereotypes it has ramified into, with a view to demonstrating that his homeland has more to offer than the geographical and ontological blankness to which it has all too often been reduced. In Bail's work, the construction of an alternative national mythology arguably proceeds from a radical reconceptualisation of the local landscape. As a visual writer, he has notably tended to rely on the motif of the straight line (seen as a Western legacy) not only to reconfigure the Australian space, but also to position himself towards the old imperial power. In this essay, I propose to outline the paradigmatic shift apparent in Bail's fiction, from his early writings, in which his view of space admittedly remains either mythical or dual, to more recent texts that can be said to transcend previous representational stereotypes and binaries. In this context, I intend to show that while Holden's Performance (his second novel published in 1987) opposes-to parodic ends-highly geometric urban centres to non-linear natural environments, Eucalyptus (1998) and The Pages (2008) seem to gesture towards a more inclusive kind of spatial imagination, which strives to embrace linearity (i.e. to incorporate it into more complex re-mappings of Australia) instead of merely discarding it.' (Publication abstract)
1 Spatial Linearity and Postcolonial Parody in Murray Bail's 'Holden's Performance' Marie Herbillon , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: A Sea for Encounters : Essays towards a Postcolonial Commonwealth 2009; (p. 149-164)
In this essay, the author explores the European origins of the trope of linearity and on the role it plays in the imposition of cultural space upon geographic space, 'focusing all along on Bail's parody of the straight line and on the ontological implications thereof' (149).
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