Emmett Stinson Emmett Stinson i(A86454 works by) (a.k.a. Emmett Samuel Stinson; Emmett S. Stinson)
Born: Established: 1977 West Virginia,
c
United States of America (USA),
c
Americas,
;
Gender: Male
Visitor assertion Arrived in Australia: 2004
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Works By

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1 Publishing the Australian Novel Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel 2023; (p. 96-112)

'This chapter charts how the rise of book history and publishing studies has reshaped the Australian literary field. In the 1990s, it was widely believed that Australia-based publishers were in danger of being absorbed into transnational corporate behemoths. The twenty-first century, by contrast, has witnessed a resurgence in Australian literary publishing. Firms such as Text and Giramondo were able to distribute their books internationally, while also fashioning local models of literary discernment. Although not economically lucrative in an absolute sense, the branding of a literary style of Australian book has reinvigorated the visibility of the Australian novel in the twenty-first century.' (Publication abstract)

1 Bad Art Friends – Jen Craig May Be the Best Australian Writer You’ve Never Heard of Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 22 June 2023;

— Review of Wall Jen Craig , 2023 single work novel

'How do you review a novel when its author has already written a book-length work of criticism on it before it was published? The rise of the Creative Writing PhD in Australia has created this perhaps unexpected dilemma for critics, who will now find that many contemporary novels come predigested, with the exegetical section of the PhD offering more extensive analysis than any in-depth review ever could.' (Introduction)

1 4 y separately published work icon Murnane Emmett Stinson , Carlton : Miegunyah Press , 2023 26224315 2023 single work biography 'Gerald Murnane is one of Australia’s most celebrated authors whose experimental and deeply idiosyncratic style has attracted rave reviews, including profiles in The New Yorker and The New York Times. Murnane’s writing combines fiction with autobiography and returns obsessively to his particular and uncommon interests: horse- racing, marbles, stained glass, Catholic iconography, hermetic writers, and the Australian landscape. His fiction offers a window into what it means to be human, and how books and reading shape our self-understanding. Murnane examines the writer’s recent work to explain both its significance to Australian literature and provide readers with a deeper understanding of his complex and self-referential fiction.' (Publication summary) 
1 The Economics of the Literary Novel Emmett Stinson , 2023 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel 2023;
1 Difficult Literature on Goodreads : Reading Alexis Wright's The Swan Book Emmett Stinson , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Textual Practice , vol. 36 no. 1 2022; (p. 94-115)

'This article considers Alexis Wright's novel The Swan Book (2013) and argues that the text's difficulty, which recalls literary modernism, should be understood as a Latourian affordance. An affordance is a quality that facilitates interaction between objective and subjective elements within readerly networks. To analyze this affordance, we examine two influential accounts of literary difficulty: George Steiner's (1978) conceptual schema of four kinds of difficulty (contingent, modal, tactical and ontological) and Leonard Diepeveen's (2003) historicised account of modernist difficulty and the various rhetorical claims made about its value. We counterpoise these accounts with an analysis of 99 Goodreads reviews of The Swan Book. We find that many Goodreads reviews foreground affective and social qualities, in which difficulty becomes a shared problem for readers. They thereby resist the traditional imperative to aesthetic judgment and offer a new set of aesthetic responses to difficulty, which we term post-critical reviews.' (Publication abstract)

1 Minor Threats Emmett Stinson , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , February 2022;

— Review of The Magpie Wing Max Easton , 2021 single work novel
1 Last Letter to a Reader by Gerald Murnane Review – An Elegiac but Cantankerous Swan Song Emmett Stinson , 2021 single work review
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 16 November 2021;

— Review of Last Letter to a Reader Gerald Murnane , 2021 selected work criticism essay

'The Australian literary great bows out with a collection of essays that ruminate on his experience of reading all his books in order.'

1 Literary Criticism in Australia Emmett Stinson , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature 2020; (p. 125-133)

'This chapter examines three major strands of literary criticism in Australia: scholarly criticism, popular criticism, and vernacular criticism. Scholarly criticism refers to peer-reviewed critical work produced by credentialed scholars within the bureaucratic structures of contemporary universities. Popular criticism is aimed at the general public and produced in print or online periodicals; its most prevalent form is the book review. Vernacular criticism refers to non-specialised modes of everyday criticism that occurs on social reading sites like Goodreads, in book clubs, in classrooms, and so forth. While these practices all have different contexts, many of them are undertaken by the same practitioners, and there is often significant overlap between scholarly and popular criticism, in particular. While it is often claimed that Australian literary criticism is in decline, available data suggest something more ambivalent: the production of scholarly criticism has increased but popular criticism may have experienced a slight decline.'

Source: Abstract. 

1 Retrospective Intention : The Implied Author and the Coherence of the Oeuvre in Border Districts and The Plains Emmett Stinson , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Gerald Murnane : Another World in This One 2020; (p. 45-62)
'This essay examines the dialogic relationship between Gerald Murnane’s final novel, Border Districts (2017), and his third published novel, The Plains (1982), to argue that Murnane’s late works enact a “retrospective intention” that revises the meaning of his earlier works. Murnane’s writings depict a complex relationship between author, intention, text and reader through the notion of the “implied author”, a figure that gives coherence to the total meaning of a work, while also being purely textual in nature. By comparing Wayne C. Booth’s influential definition of the implied author and Murnane’s use of the term, however, I argue that Murnane foregrounds and exploits its internal contradictions for generative purposes. The implied author functions similarly to what I will call retrospective intention.' (Introduction)
1 Short Story Collections, Cultural Value, and the Australian Market for Books Emmett Stinson , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , May no. 66 2020;

'This article employs a bibliometric dataset comprising forty years of Australian sole-authored short story collections to examine the degree to which non-economic values, such as cultural value and symbolic value, regulate cultural production in Australian book publishing. While short story collections may be an unexpected and oblique measure, the variable status of the sole-authored short story collection makes it a useful barometer for examining publishers’ investments in cultural forms of value, as opposed to commercial ones. This data suggests two findings that diverge from accounts of recent Australian literary production: (1) that the flowering of Australian short fiction in book-length form occurred slightly later than commonly noted (in the mid-1980s rather than the 1970s), and (2) that there has been a significant contemporary increase in the publishing of largely non-commercial short story collections since 2012. This second finding potentially problematises narratives of literary decline in Australian publishing. In particular, the re-emergence of the short story collection suggests that debates about the disaggregation of the literary field may be overstated, since this data potentially suggests a repolarisation of the field. Rather than reinscribing hierarchies of literary value, however, this repolarisation may simply reflect trends within readerly demographics that consume different kinds of texts.' (Publication abstract)

1 The Open Access Shift at UWA Publishing Is an Experiment Doomed to Fail Emmett Stinson , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 11 November 2019;

'There has been no shortage of bad news for Australia’s literary and publishing sector in the last year. Major literary journals Island and Overland have been defunded. Only 2.7% of Australia Council funding went to books and writing. The Chair in Australian Literature at University of Sydney is not being renewed.' (Introduction)

1 1 And the Winner Isn’t : On the Inherent Stupidity of Literary Prizes Emmett Stinson , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , August 2019;

'There has been no shortage of Australian critiques of literary prizes over the last few years. Giramondo’s Ivor Indyk argued that ‘no one is really suitable to be a judge of literary prizes’ and therefore ‘we should get rid of prizes altogether’. Terri-ann White, the director of University of Western Australia Publishing, announced in 2016 that the press would no longer enter its titles in literary awards, because ‘the expense (of entry fees, books and postage) and the time involved in . . . has exceeded our resources’. In what may be the most incisive and blistering recent critique, Maxine Beneba Clarke raised a series of pointed questions about prize-awarding practices, noting their ‘conservative shortlists’, the lack of diversity among awardees, and the absence of ‘a major book award for queer writing’.'  (Introduction)

1 Whose Byline Is It Anyway? Emmett Stinson , 2019 single work column
— Appears in: Kill Your Darlings [Online] , January 2019;

'With The Saturday Paper’s controversial experiment with pseudonymous book reviews coming to an end, what have we learned?' (Introduction)

1 What I’m Reading Emmett Stinson , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: Meanjin Online 2018;
1 Bad Readers Emmett Stinson , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Overland , Winter no. 231 2018; (p. 22)

'I began university in 1996, attending what could be considered an ‘elite’ US institution. It was not Ivy League, but it was regularly listed among the top thirty universities in the country. The fee for one year was just over $33,000, including room and board. My family had been comfortably middle class for most of my childhood, but my father had quit his job and taken another at much lower pay while I was in high school. I was only able to attend the university because I received direct scholarships, alongside a complex array of government-subsidised loans and grants.'  (Introduction)

1 Friday Essay : The Remarkable, Prize-winning Rise of Our Small Publishers Emmett Stinson , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: The Conversation , 4 May 2018;

'It has been a big 12 months for Australian small publishers, who have swept what are arguably the three most important national literary awards. Sydney press Giramondo published Alexis Wright’s biography Tracker, winner of the 2018 Stella Prize; Melbourne’s Black Inc. published Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers, which won the 2017 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction; and Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions (University of Western Australia Publishing) won the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award.'  (Introduction)

1 Gerald Murnane : One of Australia's Greatest Writers You May Never Have Heard of Emmett Stinson , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 5 April 2018;

'The New York Times calls him one of the best English-language writers alive. So why isn’t he a household name?' 

1 The Ethics of Evaluation Emmett Stinson , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , May 2017;
'Book reviews can have a variety of functions: they might summarise part (but usually not all) of a book’s content, analyse this same content through political or ideological lenses, perform close textual readings, highlight recurrent themes and symbolism, situate a work within an author’s oeuvre, or provide essential historical, cultural, or social contexts. These, of course, are all important tasks that can enrich and broaden the reader’s understanding of a book; in this sense, book reviewing and academic literary criticism share many goals, even if their audiences and methods frequently differ.' (Introduction)
1 y separately published work icon The Return of Print? : Contemporary Australian Publishing Aaron Mannion (editor), Emmett Stinson (editor), Clayton : Monash University Publishing , 2016 9941330 2016 anthology criticism

'This collection of essays by established and emerging scholars of Australian publishing examines the industry in the wake of both the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the various shocks and upheavals associated with the rise of ebooks. The authors here look beyond the digital, so prominent in many considerations of contemporary publishing, to questions of the book as a material artefact. As consumer trends increasingly suggest print will remain the central medium for the global publishing industry, it is asked if the messy state of affairs existing now, 'after' the digital revolution, can be described as 'post-digital'. With reference to a range of cultural, economic and technological issues, these essays examine how publishers are leveraging the possibilities afforded by multiple modes of dissemination. Contributors include David Carter, Sarah Couper, Mark Davis, Beth Driscoll, Ben Etheringtson, Lisa Fletcher, Sybil Nolan, Tracy O'Shaughnessy, Anne Richards, Emmett Stinson, and Kim Wilkins.' (Publication summary)

1 Protect Australian Stories! The Campaign against PIR Reform Emmett Stinson , 2016 single work column
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , May 2016;
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