AustLit
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Contents
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Essay Now : The Contemporary Essay in Australia and beyond,
single work
criticism
'But, what is an essay? In his introduction to the 2014 volume of The Best Australian Essays, Robert Manne tackles the question of definition (intriguingly, one nearly every editor in the series has also foregrounded) and hopes, given this is his ‘second innings’, that it is a problem he now has a clearer view of:
I had thought of an essay as any brief piece of non-fiction prose. I no longer do […] For me at least, an essay is a reasonably short piece of prose in which we hear a distinctive voice attempting to recollect or illuminate or explain one or another aspect of the world. It follows from this that no essay could be jointly authored. It also follows, that, with an essay, we trust that the distinctive voice we hear is truthful or authentic, even when perhaps it is not. (ix)
That Manne drops ‘non-fiction’ from his definition seems significant. As does his emphasis on a distinctive voice, authentic and truthful, even when perhaps it is not.'
(Introduction)
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The Essay as Polemical Performance : ‘Salted Genitalia’ and the ‘Gender Card’,
single work
'On October 9, 2012, the then Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard rose to her feet in Canberra’s Parliament House, and, in response to a motion tabled by Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, delivered her blistering Misogyny Speech. Although Gillard’s speech was met with cynicism by the Australian Press Gallery, some accusing her of playing the ‘gender card’, it reverberated around the world and when the international coverage poured back into the country, many Australians stood up and listened.
'One of them was author, essayist, classical concert pianist and mother, Anna Goldsworthy.
'Shortly after the delivery of The Misogyny Speech, Quarterly Essay editor Chris Feik approached Goldsworthy to write the 50th essay for the Black Inc. publication with his idea to view this event through a cultural lens. It took several months to research and compose the characteristically long-form (25,000 word) essay that Quarterly Essay publishes every three months as a single volume; ‘Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny’ was launched at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on July 1, 2013, five days after Julia Gillard was deposed from her prime ministership by Kevin Rudd.
'This paper takes a look back at the 50th issue of the Quarterly Essay, to discuss with its author her essay-writing process and the aftermath of publication. Goldsworthy is erudite as she looks at the construction of the essay, its contents, and her love of essay writing. Although she confesses to not having a definition for the form, she believes it does not matter; that its fluidity is a basic constituent element. Her love of language and music inform both the breadth of her essay, as well as its narrative – there is lyricism to her sentences and a musicality to her structure.
'This paper also contextualises ‘Unfinished Business’ as an example of the crucial longform essay contribution that Black Inc.’s Quarterly Essay performs in the Australian literary/political/cultural/intellectual environment. There were critics of Goldsworthy’s essay, and these are assessed as a component of how ‘the essay’ potentially can function in a liberal First-World society, as demonstrated by the Quarterly Essay periodical.'(Introduction)
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Walking, Talking, Looking : The Calibre Essay and Remembering Persuasively in Australia,
single work
criticism
'The Calibre Essay Prize has been awarded annually since 2007 by the Australian Book Review. In this paper I argue that a number of the Calibre essays represent a discontinuous, but vital, conversation concerning the interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. I use the work of Ross Gibson to interpret some of the commended and winning essays. I suggest that the essay form is suited to negotiating difficulties that persist in contemporary Australia as a result of colonial incursion, and argue that the Calibre essays under examination offer possible mechanisms for reconciliation. The form and method of the essay, as well as the finished work itself, help writer and reader to engage with others, with silences, and with the past through concentration of focus, conversation and reciprocity, and the particular flâneur-like qualities of essay writing. I argue that the Calibre essays are examples of what Gibson calls persuasive remembering (2015b: 29).' (Introduction)
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The Essay in the Anthropocene : Towards Entangled Nonfiction,
single work
criticism
'The essay as a genre in the tradition of Montaigne stages the inadequacies of attempts to grasp at objects and what connects us to them and them to us and us to each other, and then slings away the safety wheels by wondering: who we are anyway? But what happens to the essay in the age of ‘hyperobjects’ (Morton 2013) like global warming? This essay examines how the anti-methodical techniques of the essay (personal, lyric) might be placed to respond to life in the Anthropocene, when the ‘I’ of the essayist finds itself in increasingly uncharted waters, when ‘nature’ itself, let alone ‘human nature’, begin to look like quaint conceptual knick-knacks, and when humans can no longer claim special ontological status over nonhumans. Philosophers, anthropologists, environmental humanists and other scholars are increasingly experimenting with modes of writing enmeshing scientific data and critical theory with affectively charged, embodied and intimate accounts. At the same time, essayists are rethinking the boundaries of the personal, and trying new ways to write from a standpoint rejecting human/nonhuman binaries. This essay seeks to draw connections across the disciplines, to invite further alliances between creative writers and fellow academics, as together we essay the Anthropocene with entangled nonfiction.' (Introduction)
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Embodied Subjectivity and the Project of the Contemporary Literary Essay,
single work
criticism
'The essay’s capacity to narrate a situated and embodied experience that entwines poetics, politics and affect enables the form a particular methodology. Contemporary critical theorist Rosi Braidotti has argued for the urgent need to revise theoretical aspects of affect and authenticity so as to more fully register the increasingly complex way we experience embodied subjectivity (2013). In this article, I argue that the contemporary literary essayist is well placed to negotiate such a revision, and that renewed interest in the form of the literary essay during the last two decades can be read as a timely contribution to such a project.' (Introduction)
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Provocatively Calm : On David Malouf as Essayist,
single work
criticism
''This article examines the essays of David Malouf, many of which have been recently collected in three thematic volumes: A First Place (2014a), The Writing Life (2014b) and Being There (2015). My starting point is to argue that Malouf’s most important essays are politically charged. As a writer-activist he posits distinctive, sometimes controversial, positions, arguing strongly and passionately for alternative ways of thinking about Australia and the world, and indeed alternative ways for human beings to move through, and participate in, the world. However, Malouf is no firebrand: the tone of his essays is relentlessly calm; he brings together the emphatic and the empathetic, and he still tries to convince the reader. This article focuses on the political implications of Malouf’s calm but opinionated approach to his essays, as well as on how Malouf sets out to persuade readers. (Introduction)
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The Emancipatory Personal Essay?,
single work
criticism
'The personal essay is an art form that serves as both an expression of highly individualised specificity and as a narrative form that substantiates the individual’s access to universal subjectivity. In the personal essay, the author elevates individual specificity to the domain of universality as it is understood within the thought frameworks of liberal humanism. The personal essay is thus a ‘liberal’ art form that presupposes commonality, or universality, between human subjects. The personal essay has also been taken up as a ‘consciousness raising’ project to identify a ‘collective consciousness’ shared by author and reader alike, and in this iteration is an emancipatory political tool. In this iteration, does the expression of fractured and marginalised identities in the personal essay form undo the hegemonic thinking that produces those identities? In this paper I identify two personal essay styles, the ‘subject position-oriented personal essay’ and the ‘dialectical personal essay’, to enlarge upon the conflict inherent to the personal essay: that the friction between singular and universal subjectivities cannot be adequately accounted for by a liberal humanist art form, nor is this disjuncture always comprehended in the personal essay as it is currently practiced.' (Introduction)
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Both Broken and Joined : Subjectivity and the Lyric Essay,
single work
criticism
'The lyric essay is a protean form that allows writers to evoke and explore aspects of personal memory and individual subjective experience with great immediacy, while also addressing more general and abstract ideas. The use of the term ‘lyric essay’ has been questioned but still successfully serves the purpose of suggesting the kind of work that proceeds not as a conventional essay does – through logical argument – but rather through the juxtaposition of sometimes contradictory tropes, often presented as fragmentary, suggestive and even ‘poetic’. Such essays render an impression of the happenstance and provisionality of lived experience. They raise questions about the coherence (or otherwise) of the multiple perspectives informing an individual’s subjectivity.
'The authors’ practice-led Mosaics project examines the lyric essay’s multiplicity of viewpoints, fragmentation and faceted nature through investigating the mosaic-like nature of its form and content, along with the extent to which such mosaic-like patterning may make the lyric essay especially well suited to the rendering of particularised subjective experience. In doing so the project references the example of Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí in his work on the Palau Guell and Parc Guell (with Joseph Jujol), where he incorporated fragmented and broken tile and stone pieces into his mosaics. Such mosaics, in creating extensive and ever-evolving patterns, may be seen as closely analogous to the lyric essay’s own expressive patternings and techniques.'(Introduction)
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Wild Associations : Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson and the Lyric Essay,
single work
criticism
'The lyric essay often works associatively to create meaning through metaphor, analogy, and the juxtaposition of anecdotes, observations, or citations. This paper examines these ‘wild’ associations in Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby (2013), and in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009) and The Argonauts (2015). It argues that all three texts work like long lyric essays and construct an essaying ‘I’ whose associative approach presents not just a view of the world but a method for viewing the world.' (Introduction)
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Essay (Queer). The. Essay. Queer. And. All. That.,
single work
criticism
'What is this thing we call/name essay, and what is its relationship to queer? This paper claims that the joy of essay (and queer) is that there are no answers necessarily – the pleasure or jouissance is in what the search might bring and where it might take you; how the search is, or might be expressed. Essay (queer) elevates all that is tangential, oblique, unspoken, transitory, ambiguous, unsettled, peculiar, strange. Maggie Nelson sets the scene with an exposition of language, experience, and reasons for keeping on writing, giving us her why-I-write moment. What follows in this paper, with examples, is a consideration of etymologies, form, unconventions, and desire. In shaping a view, the approach taken ruptures the so-called borders between scholarly and creative to present a fluid, free-forming thing that does what Nelson suggests is ‘never as certain, but always as possible’ (2015: 142). It takes pleasure in Hélène Cixous’s imund or ‘not unclean’ idea of writing (1993).' (Introduction)
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The Imagined Parakeet : Invention and Fact Irrelevance in the Speculative Essay,
single work
criticism
'Despite the ascendancy of the lyric essay as a form over the past two decades, the essay, whether lyric or otherwise, is still pegged to the category of nonfiction, an amorphous genre that includes everything from journalism to criticism. Any definition of nonfiction will include some variation of the idea that, foremost, nonfiction considers what is ‘informative’ and ‘factual’. But are such definitions limiting where many essayists are concerned?
'Must an essay, as a subset of nonfiction, entertain ‘thing-ness’ or the empirical world at all? Or is the truth of an essay sometimes speculative without the need to admit things or facts, existing simply as a tidal wave of strange imaginings? A Speculative Essay concerns itself with the figurative over the literal, ambiguity over knowing, meditation over reportage.
'For some essayists, in all manner of subgenres, from nature writers to personal essayists, facts as such matter only in the path they open to speculation. While this kind of formal speculation is often conflated with the lyric essay, the lyric essay does not own speculation. Essays that tilt more towards metaphor than fact exist in a crack between genres that remains unclassifiable.' (Introduction)
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From Aristotle to Crime Scene : A Forensics of the Academic Essay,
single work
criticism
'Writing in the academy is almost always about making a claim, or ‘case’, based on evidence, as one does in court: its rhetoric is forensic (L. forensis ‘in open court, public’, from forum), in Aristotle’s sense. Just as forensic rhetoric takes as a given the laws of the polis and is directed at persuading a judge (Aristotle 1991: 80-82), academic writing assumes a set of rules (one must be sincere, demonstrate one’s argument using evidence, and obey a certain decorum) and is written to persuade an assessor, namely a teacher or peer. And, since the Harvard ‘forensic system’ of essay writing in the late 1870s (Russell 2002: 51-63), it has often been taught in the language of forensic rhetoric: in particular, the apocryphal ‘rhetorical triangle’ of persuasion by ethos, logos and pathos (Booth 1963; Kinneavy 1971) and the informal logic of the enthymeme (Toulmin 1958). At its best, academic writing provides a forum to animate and air ideas. As such, it is amenable to what Eyal Weizman calls forensis: ‘a critical practice’ that ‘interrogate[s] the relation between … fields and forums’ (Weizman 2014: 9; compare Braidotti 2013 on the ‘forensic turn’). For Weizman, a field is a ‘contested object or site [of investigation]’ and a forum is ‘the place where the results of an investigation are presented and contested’ (Ibid.). Where forensics allows objects like bodies, weapons and scenes to ‘speak’, forensis can give voice to sites like academic architecture (Sturm and Turner 2011), forms (McLean and Hoskin 1998) or even essays. Here I explore the academic essay as a forensic site, ‘an entry-point from which to reconstruct larger processes, events and social relations, conjunctions of actors and practices, structures and technologies’ of the academy (Weizman 2014: 18-19). The academic essay is at once a report on research, an argument, a fractal structure, a means of assessment and, as this essay will argue, an exemplar of and exercise in performativity (Sturm 2012).' (Introduction)
- Aqua Profunda, single work essay
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Not a Memoir : An Essay,
single work
'1. Some stories demand to be told, almost physically.
'People always say that don’t they? That you can write your way out of pain, trauma, misery. That it can be spun into airy gold on the page.' (Introduction)
- We Might as Well Call It a Boat, single work essay
- Please Supply Own Title:______________________________________, single work essay
