Sue Kossew Sue Kossew i(A18921 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 The Vanished Woman : Reversing the Silencing about Women and War Sue Kossew , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 462 2024; (p. 30-31)

— Review of Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend : Australian Women’s War Fictions Donna Coates , 2023 multi chapter work criticism
'Near the beginning of Wifedom, Anna Funder describes a disappearing trick whereby a male magician conjures away his female assistant. She uses this as a trope for history’s tendency to make women vanish: ‘Where has she gone?’ Funder asks. This invisibility is especially the case in relation to women and war. Not only are women’s roles in wars downplayed or ignored, but women’s writing on war is seldom regarded as ‘war literature’. As Donna Coates, the author of this newly published study, Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend: Australian women’s war fictions, notes, the bookshelves at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra contain numerous books ‘by and about men at war’ and very few examples of women’s war writing.' 

(Introduction)

1 Gail Jones’ One Another Explores the Life of Joseph Conrad and the Transformative Potential of Reading Sue Kossew , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 28 February 2024;

— Review of One Another Gail Jones , 2024 single work novel
1 In J.M. Coetzee’s Latest Story Collection, Questions of the Soul Become Urgent as the Body Becomes Frail Sue Kossew , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 18 July 2023;

— Review of The Pole and Other Stories J. M. Coetzee , 2023 selected work short story

'Devotees of J.M. Coetzee’s writing will be delighted at the publication of The Pole and Other Stories. What may be surprising to some about this collection is that the stories have all appeared before in some form – but not always in English.' (Introduction)

1 An Edgy Affair J.M. Coetzee’s ‘especial Form of Dissidence’ Sue Kossew , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , March no. 451 2023; (p. 22-23)

— Review of J.M. Coetzee and Neoliberal Culture Andrew Gibson , 2022 multi chapter work criticism
Anyone who has read J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) will vividly recall the character Alan – annoyingly brash, unethical, self-serving and sexist; one of a new generation of tech-savvy investment consultants. For British academic, literary critic, and writer Andrew Gibson, in this new study of Coetzee, these are among the typical traits of neoliberal individualism that Coetzee’s body of writing resists and critiques. Gibson characterises contemporary global neoliberalism as having led not just to the impoverishment of modern culture but to a lack of planetary care, resulting in climate change, precarity, and depleted resources. The book’s dustjacket brings these issues closer to home; it features an apocalyptic image of the thick orange smoke from the 2019 bushfires at the New South Wales coastal town of – appropriately – Eden. (Gibson was in Australia at this time as a Visiting Professor at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice in Adelaide.) (Introduction)
1 ‘It’s Just Some Guy, Not a Monster’ : Gendered Violence in Emily Maguire’s Recent Novels Sue Kossew (interviewer), Anne Brewster (interviewer), 2021 single work interview
— Appears in: Australian Literary Studies , October vol. 36 no. 3 2021;

'Emily Maguire is a Sydney-based author who has written six novels, three non-fiction books and numerous articles on feminism, culture and literature. Her early novels Taming the Beast (2004) and The Gospel According to Luke (2006) were both awarded Special Commendations in the Kathleen Mitchell Awards. Smoke in the Room (2009) and Fishing for Tigers (2012) were followed by the two more recent novels that have had the most impact: An Isolated Incident (2016) – which was shortlisted for both the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Award – and Love Objects (2021). Her novels tackle uncomfortable topics such as abusive relationships, intimate partner violence and the ways in which young women are socially conditioned to be ashamed of their own sexuality. In these latter two novels, she deploys alternating perspectives to explore the multifaceted effects of often-traumatic events on her different characters. This in-depth analysis of characters’ motivations and emotional responses mitigates against any simplistic view of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.'(Publication abstract)

1 Things Known and Foreknown : A Virtuoso Performance from Gail Jones Sue Kossew , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 425 2020; (p. 22-23)

— Review of Our Shadows Gail Jones , 2020 single work novel

'Gail Jones’s new novel, Our Shadows, provides readers with another virtuoso performance, showing a writer fully in control of her medium. It is a poetic and beautifully crafted evocation of shadowy pasts whose traumatic effects (in the world and in individual lives) stretch deep into the present and the future.'

1 Meteorological Thinking : The Ethical Hesitations of Gail Jones Sue Kossew , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 424 2020; (p. 44-45)

— Review of Gail Jones : Word, Image, Ethics Tanya Dalziell , 2020 multi chapter work criticism
1 5 y separately published work icon Rethinking the Victim : Gender and Violence in Contemporary Australian Women's Writing Anne Brewster , Sue Kossew , Routledge Taylor & Francis Group , 2019 20029486 2019 multi chapter work criticism

'This book is the first to examine gender and violence in Australian literature. It argues that literary texts by Australian women writers offer unique ways of understanding the social problem of gendered violence, bringing this often private and suppressed issue into the public sphere. It draws on the international field of violence studies to investigate how Australian women writers challenge the victim paradigm and figure women's agencies. In doing so, it provides a theoretical context for the increasing number of contemporary literary works by Australian women writers that directly address gendered violence, an issue that has taken on urgent social and political currency.

'By analysing Australian women's literary representations of gendered violence, this book rethinks victimhood and agency, particularly from a feminist perspective. One of its major innovations is that it examines mainstream Australian women's writing alongside that of Indigenous and minoritised women. In doing so it provides insights into the interconnectedness of Australia's diverse settler, Indigenous and diasporic histories in chapters that examine intimate partner violence, violence against Indigenous women and girls, family violence and violence against children, and the war and political violence.' (Publication summary)

1 J. M. Coetzee and the Woman Question Sue Kossew , Melinda Harvey , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Coetzee's Women 2019; (p. 1-16)
1 y separately published work icon Reading Coetzee's Women Sue Kossew (editor), Melinda Harvey (editor), Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2019 18451126 2019 anthology criticism

'This is the first book to focus entirely on the under-researched but crucial topic of women in the work of J. M. Coetzee, generally regarded as one of the world’s most significant living writers. The fourteen essays in this collection raise the central issue of how Coetzee’s texts address the ‘woman question’. There is a focus on Coetzee’s representation of women, engagement with women writers and the ethics of what has been termed his ‘ventriloquism’ of women’s voices in his fiction and autobiographical writings, right up to his most recent novel, The Schooldays of Jesus. As such, this collection makes important links between the disciplines of literary and gender studies. It includes essays by well-known Coetzee scholars as well as by emerging scholars from around the world, providing fascinating and timely global insights into how his works are read from differing cultural and scholarly perspectives.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

1 Precarity and Survival in Tara June Winch’s After the Carnage Sue Kossew , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , May no. 64 2019;

'The short story genre is particularly well suited to capturing ‘fragmentation, displacement, diaspora and identity’, according to Maggie Awadalla and Paul March-Russell (3). This claim seems to be borne out in a number of recent collections of Australian short stories by writers of nonmainstream backgrounds whose stories focus on exactly these issues. Examples include Nam Le’s The Boat (2008), Roanna Gonsalves’s The Permanent Resident (2016), Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil (2014) and Tara June Winch’s After the Carnage (2016), the latter being the focus of this essay. All of these writers display an awareness in their stories of ‘entangled histories that precede and exceed imperial and national formations’, to quote Dilip M. Menon (38). Menon, writing about the Global South and using Édouard Glissant’s term, ‘archipelagic thinking’, coined in relation to the Caribbean, further explicates this kind of thinking as generative of ‘maps of affinities’ that recognise ‘the fact that identities are conjunctural and oscillate between narrower and wider imaginings … between local identities and international ones’ (40). This essay takes up the concept of alliances and ‘maps of affinities’ as they are represented in and by Winch’s short story collection. Winch is an Indigenous Australian writer of Wiradjuri, Afghan, and English heritage who is now based in France. Even this brief biographical information draws attention to the mobility of contemporary global identities and the shifting nature of national identification. Winch’s own physical distance from Australia (she currently lives in Europe) has, she has suggested in an interview, been helpful for her writing, enabling an outsider’s view that has involved ‘searching for [her] story amongst other people’s stories’ (‘After the Carnage’ n.p.). In dialogue with these fluid national identities and entangled histories are issues of intersectionality where race, class and gender impact on the themes of violence, disadvantage and precarity that bring different minoritised constituencies into proximity with each other. Winch, I argue, thematises the ways in which violence, gender, race, class and precarity may be seen to be intertwined. At the same time, her stories reveal moments of survival and resilience in the precarious lives of their characters. In writing not just of the Australian nation but also of the transnation(al), her stories draw attention to cross-cultural affiliations as well as to the ongoing inequalities that beset marginalised groups. Menon’s concept of ‘maps of affinities’ is thus a useful lens through which to view these stories. This term aptly engages the ways in which Winch, in this collection, addresses the ‘conjunctural’ (40) interactions between the global and local, reminding readers of the ongoing global after-effects of colonisation, and the ways in which violence and survival are common to both.' (Introduction)

1 Introduction : Gender and Violence in Cultural Texts of the Global South Anne Brewster , Anna MacDonald , Sue Kossew , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , May no. 64 2019;
'The term 'Global South' is used variously by politicians, development organisations, arts practitioners and scholars working in a range of disciplines to denote a conceptual framework, a geopolitical category, a condition of existence, a research methodology and a metaphor. Given the variety of uses to which the term is applied, it is unsurprising that the ‘Global South’ is highly contested both as to its meaning and as to its value as a geopolitical or other analytical tool.' (Introduction)
1 Kate Grenville's Transgressive Narratives Sue Kossew , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Claiming Space for Australian Women's Writing 2017; (p. 127-140)

'Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s foremost women writers whose fictional works have, since the early 1980s, tracked and charted aspects of Australian life. Her novels and short stories refigure literary and national spaces, particularly for women, but also in terms of cross-cultural interactions across the settler-Indigenous divide. Her most well-known and celebrated novels, Lilian’s Story (1985) and the international best-seller, The Secret River (2005) have rightly become classics in the field of Australian literature. This chapter analyses the ways in which Grenville’s narratives have explored the “dark places” of Australian life and have illuminated and teased out the tensions, inequalities and violence lurking below the surface of the “lucky country” and how they problematise the all-too-easily accepted story of white settlement.'

Source: Abstract.

1 J. M. Coetzee and the Parental Punctum Sue Kossew , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: J. M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus : The Ethics of Ideas and Things 2017; (p. 149-164)
1 An Inside View : The Master of Slow Reading Sue Kossew , 2017 single work essay review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 394 2017; (p. 11-12)

'While it is true that the essay as a genre has a long and continuous history, it is not always an easy form to categorise or define. J.M. Coetzee has himself contrasted the ‘rather tight discourse’ of criticism with the relative freedom of writing fiction. Indeed, essays – like those collected in this volume – require ‘slow reading’, a term derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement that he was a ‘teacher of slow reading’. Coetzee’s essays, twenty-three of which are collected here as Late Essays: 2006–2017, are exemplars of his own careful reading while also providing engaging, accessible, and informative insights into writers and their works. They have all been previously published, either as introductions to new editions of books, as book chapters, or as reviews (most notably in the New York Review of Books, to which Coetzee regularly contributes). Unlike his novels, the essays are direct and unambiguous, offering not only one writer’s evaluation of another writer but also the astute assessments of a lifelong teacher of literature.' (Introduction)

1 Revisiting the Haunted Past : Christine Piper’s After Darkness Sue Kossew , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , May no. 61 2017;

'

A frequently-used metaphor in Australian national discourse is that of one or other ‘shameful’ or ‘dark’ chapter in our past. Alongside the notion of shame and guilt comes the idea of repressed and silenced memory, either through deliberate institutionalised forgetting or through the impossibility of fully articulating traumatic pasts. At the same time, as Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton suggest, ‘forms of remembering and commemoration have become the central contemporary mode through which various constituencies understand history, including the national past’ (371). This seemingly contradictory clash of a willed forgetfulness alongside a fascination with remembrance may account for the popularity in Australian literature of historical novels, a sub-set of which may be termed ‘sorry novels,’ and of literary works that may be regarded as participating in a process of what Tessa Morris-Suzuki and others in East Asia Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts of Violence (2013) term ‘reconciliation as method’. This concept is defined ‘not as an end-point in which consensus on history is achieved, but rather as sets of media, skills and processes that encourage the creative sharing of ideas and understandings about the past’ (13). The focus on ‘creative sharing’ suggests that such texts may participate in uncovering ‘unfinished business’ and in this way contribute to debates about understandings of the past. At the very least, the concept of ‘reconciliation as method’ prompts us to consider how literary narratives (among other forms of cultural texts) provoke questions of historical responsibility.' (introduction)

1 1 Unfinished Business : Apology Cultures in the Asia Pacific Sue Kossew , Beatrice Trefalt , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , May no. 61 2017;
1 The Escapologist : Possible Equivalences in a Cat-and-Mouse Game Sue Kossew , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , October no. 385 2016; (p. 29-30)

— Review of The Schooldays of Jesus J. M. Coetzee , 2016 single work single work novel
'n order to grasp the complexity of allusions in J.M. Coetzee's new novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, you need to have your wits about you. On the other hand, as with its prequel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), the novel may also be read fairly simply, as a fable. As a sequel to the first 'Jesus' novel, it progresses the story of Simón, Inés, and David, the 'holy family,' as they continue their journey, with their dog Bolívar, from the town named Novilla to a new town, Estrella, meaning 'star' in Spanish, in an unspecified Spanish-speaking country.' (Introduction)
1 The Case for Gail Jones’ Sorry Sue Kossew , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 22 July 2014;

— Review of Sorry Gail Jones , 2007 single work novel
1 Recovering the Past : Entangled Histories in Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance Sue Kossew , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: Decolonizing the Landscape : Indigenous Cultures in Australia 2014; (p. 169-182)
Examines Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance via his conceptualisation of it as a 'recovery' novel and the inter-related experiences of colonial history.
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