Cirrus@Austlit

'In a j carruthers’s new collection, verse stanzas, running vertically from top to bottom rather than left to right, challenge the dominant linear mode of thinking and writing in the West. They call attention to alternative forms of representation and reveal the existence of other landscapes. The purpose of the ‘axis’ is no longer confined to one-way movement, but to rotation and circular modes of thinking, writing, and generating new ideas.' (Introduction)

'John Kinsella is a prolific writer from Western Australia. This article takes a topopoetic approach to considering his poetry and poetics by connecting studies of Yi-Fu Tuan’s topophilia and the paradoxical views of Zhuangzi and Thoreau in illustrating some tensions between language and place, connection and disconnection, and placement and displacement in Kinsella’s writings. In particular, I discuss Kinsella’s affective ties to the land and his anti-pastoral stance by parodying the European settlement on Country traditionally owned by Indigenous peoples. His poetry presents a dystopian world that challenges the old European sense of a pastoral society. By making connections between a Chinese sense of the earth and Kinsella’s poetics, I argue that as paradoxical as Kinsella's poetics may be, his writings, imbued with influences from different sources, demonstrate an effort to save the worsening earth.' (Publication abstract)

'In 'The Death of the Author', Roland Bathes develops a post-structuralist approach to the issues of reading, writing, and the relationship between texts and the signs that comprise them. Barthes begins the paper with an illustration of the novella Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac, in which a castrato is disguised as a woman, and of whom Balzac writes the following sentence :'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility' (Balzac in Barthes 142). (Introduction)

'Modern Australian Criticism and Theory brings together a selection of contemporary essays on Australian literature and cultural studies written by leading Australian critics and theorists...

The essays selected for this volume reflect upon the main critical and theoretical influences on the study of Australian literature and culture since the 1980s...' Source: Modern Australian Criticism and Theory (2010)

'After 40 years in Australia, António Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness he calls "Shanghai Dancing," António seeks to understand the source of his condition in his family's wanderings. Reversing his parents' own migration, António heads back to their native Shanghai, where his world begins to fragment as his ancestry starts to flood into his present, and emissaries of glittering pre-war China, evangelical Liverpool and seventeenth-century Portugal merge into contemporary backdrops across Asia, Europe and Australia. A "fictional autobiography," Shanghai Dancing is a dazzling meditation on identity, language and disorientation that combines photographs and written images in the style of W.G. Sebald. ' (Publication summary)