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'Contemporary food writing is currently gaining visibility, featuring across media platforms from publishing to television and online forms. Kathryn Hughes writes that food writing has 'evolved its own elaborate ecosystem, bristling with sub-genres, starting points, cross-currents and trip wires' (2010). In an attempt to negotiate the complexity of this ecosystem, this article defines and then suggests a range of ways of describing and grouping one sub-genre of food writing, the food memoir. These groupings include categorising by subject matter and content, as well as in terms of authorial approaches to writing these kinds of memoir.' (Author's abstract)
'This paper engages with the postscript of JM Coetzee's 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello with the intention of introducing the concept that Coetzee's late works act as 'postscripts' to his previous body of writing. It proposes that every act of writing, as particularly demonstrated in the suspended poetics of metaphor and analogy, is an act of sacrifice, as evinced by Lady Chandos in Coetzee's Postscript: 'Always it is not what I say, but something else!' (Coetzee 2003: 228). The paper observes the deficiency of language, the writer's attempt nonetheless, and the inevitable resultant ruptures in text and self. The article pursues these ideas through both critical and creative writing. ' (Author's abstract)
'Reams of words have already been written on (the bodies of) the marginalised. I argue that the language we use to tell stories of difference has become so saturated with overdetermined and proscriptive meaning that its efficacy in articulating the complexity of life at the margins has been compromised. Language, both academic and creative, has absorbed a sophisticated, quasi-religious trope that is shot through with images and references to 'the sacred', and while purporting to 'help' serves to further silence the lived experience of whole sections of the community already struggling to be heard. My aim is to mine a seam of language from the collective imagination that will depict aspects of the real and the now that remain for the most part unspoken, if not unspeakable.' (Author's abstract)
'Recent developments in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis have identified Creative Writing as a means of understanding subjectivity through what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has called suppléance, a stand-in which helps the ego cohere and in some cases prevents subjective dissolution, as may have been the case with Joyce. Following on from my own previous theoretical and creative research in this area, the story 'Oranges and Lemons' addresses the question of the mechanism of suppléance from the concept of art therapy by contrasting the symbolic dimension of language with the imaginary dimension of art making. In doing so, it confirms that suppléance arises out of the need to overcome an anxiety which veils the shadow of Das Ding, hence also the threat of subjective dissolution. Further, 'Oranges and Lemons' suggests that there may be different structural types of suppléance and that as an organising principle suppléance may be both a temporary or permanent device.
Keywords: art, psychoanalysis, writing, subjectivity, suppléance.' (Author's abstract)
