Stephen Harris Stephen Harris i(A33271 works by)
Gender: Male
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 Island Life and Wild Time : Crossing into Country in Tim Winton's Island Home Stephen Harris , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change 2022; (p. 135-161)
1 Fear and Loathing in the Anthropocene : Grief, Compassion and the Benefits of Literature Stephen Harris , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Emotions : History, Culture, Society , vol. 4 no. 1 2020; (p. 167–182)

'This essay considers the nexus between literature and compassion in relation to the well-reported global environmental crisis and the attendant range of emotions, as signalled by the terms ‘ecocide’, ‘extinction crisis’ and ‘eco-anxiety’. While the words ‘grief’ and ‘hope’ have come to represent a range of associated emotions and feelings, there are important affective inflections occurring between these two semantic reference points, which are in themselves significant, if less amenable to debate and conversion to meaningful action. The following essay considers the nuances of these same affective extremities and emotional complexities, with particular reference to collective emotions such as anger and fear, and the implications of sustained feelings of dread, despair and collective trauma. The essay concludes by arguing for the constructive role of literature in mediating collective feeling and redirecting negative public emotions.' (Publication abstract)
1 Tim Winton’s Dirt Music : Sounding Country/Re-siting Place Stephen Harris , 2015 single work single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 1 2015; 'In his novel, Dirt Music, Tim Winton centres the narrative on the literary conceit of “dirt” music as an elemental thus generative force that at once ‘earths’ and elevates the human being. Luther Fox, one of two central characters, experiences a powerful epiphany upon playing a rudimentary musical instrument through which he creates a reverberative drone summoned from the environment using improvised natural acoustics. In doing so, he enters a paradoxical state of immanent transcendence through the drone experienced as a kind of pure sound. Thus, Dirt Music invites creative speculation about the power of music as source of both music (rhythm/harmony) and ontological ‘poetics’. In this article, I explore the literary significance and philosophical and ethical implications of what Winton has called (after the indigenous poet and elder, Bill Neidjie) “practical mysticism”. In this way, the transcendentally spiritual is always grounded in a “common-sense” experience of fully lived being, just as ‘dirt’ music is ‘rooted’ in the energised abstraction of the aharmonic drone – “common” as both a shared and an empirically immediate sense of wonder at the living, interactive presence of the natural world. In Dirt Music, then, the act of making music is richly allusive: to make music becomes a means of working towards a felt and vital connection with country; but it is also to understand how music works conductively as indigenous sound, effecting the animating interplay or interconnection between individual consciousness and the living presence and force of natural world as ecology and wilderness, landscape and country.' (Publication abstract)
1 Stephen Harris Reviews Southerly: The Political Imagination Stephen Harris , 2014 single work review
— Appears in: Plumwood Mountain [Online] , August 2014;
— Review of Southerly vol. 73 no. 1 2013 periodical issue
1 Untitled Stephen Harris , 2012 single work review
— Appears in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing , vol. 48 no. 1 2012; (p. 110-111)
— Review of Sacred Australia : Post-Secular Considerations 2009 anthology essay criticism
1 Untitled Stephen Harris , 2006 single work review
— Appears in: Reviews in Australian Studies , March vol. 1 no. 1 2006;
— Review of Three Dollars Robert Connolly , Elliot Perlman , 2005 single work film/TV
1 Heavier Than Air? Stephen Harris , 2000 single work review
— Appears in: Ulitarra , July no. 17/18 2000; (p. 204-206)
— Review of Last Journey : A Novel Robert Morrison , 2000 single work novel ; Searching for the Volcano and Other Stories Jane Downing , 1999 selected work short story
1 David Foster's 'Moonlite': Re-Viewing History as Satirical Fable- Towards a Post-Colonial Past Stephen Harris , 1997 single work criticism
— Appears in: Westerly , Autumn vol. 42 no. 1 1997; (p. 71-88)
1 The Word He Types Stephen Harris , 1997 single work review
— Appears in: Ulitarra , no. 11 1997; (p. 122-125)
— Review of Somewhere New : New and Selected Stories Michael Wilding , 1996 selected work short story
1 The Words He Types Stephen Harris , 1997 single work review
— Appears in: Ulitarra , no. 11 1997; (p. 122-125)
— Review of Book of the Reading Michael Wilding , 1994 selected work short story
1 A River in the Black Forest i "A moving pastiche of greens", Stephen Harris , 1988 single work poetry
— Appears in: Forest Echoes : And Other Verses for the Tasmanian Bush 1988; (p. 27)
X