AustLit

'This special issue of JEASA represents the manner in which literature carries life with it, the manner in which literature upends, or explicates the “entangled significance” (van Dooren 7) of our days. It is aimed at exploring how poetry is experienced, revised, lived, analysed, enunciated, performed and measured in our everyday life. The issue is a collation of commissioned and happenstance interventions. In sending the call for submissions out to various friends for scholarship, the details provided were vague; I asked them that they submit something which demonstrated their excitement, to write on something that compelled them in their reading and in their scholarship. The responses received demonstrate a flourishing engagement with Australian writing at the very heart of our intellectual community, and attest to the possibilities of Australian scholarship and the communities of thought developed here. This work evidences the various ways we attend to the complex and ethical significance of poetry, of writing that makes meaning in the world, and the scholarship we are publishing today generates distinctive encounters with the material of language.'

Source: Introduction.

'Contemporary Australian poet Gig Ryan’s early work explores lyric romance between zombie-like subjects and survivors. Bringing the zombie into contact with the lyric, this work raises questions about how the subject feels their transition into posthuman states of being in Anthropocene neoliberalism. Often neglected from discussions of zombie capitalism, poetry written in the 1970s and 1980s presents anxieties that existed for the first generation of youth culture in neoliberalist late capitalism. Ryan’s punk, anti-ballad confrontations with the Orphic lyric such as the well-known poem “If I Had a Gun” indict its alignment with a broader metaphysics of dead bodies lyricised in romantic code. As a result, by her mid-career period, Ryan has developed a Eurydicean counter-lyric in which the lyric speaker assails the violence of patriarchal romance, and the masculine-feminine divisions that sustain it, through post-punk negativity.'

Source: Abstract.

'The following article proposes a reading of the poetry of Amanda Stewart, through the notion of the ecological, conceptual lyric, as theorized through the song practice of the lyrebird. It argues for the significance of Stewart’s work, but also for rethinking the figurative relation between birdsong and poetry, with specific reference to the lyrebird, and to Australia as lyric’s conceptual origin.'

Source: Abstract.

'Australian poets Gig Ryan and Cassandra Atherton engage with a range of Western mythological figures in their explorations of contemporary feminist issues. In selecting these mythological women as key figures in several poems, Ryan and Atherton both engage with historicised issues of voice, agency and control. Central to their explorations is the question of autonomy: who may speak, and what may she say? In this discussion, close readings of poems in the recent Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry anthology are compared with poems from these poets’ other collections, to establish on-going use of mythologised and canonical women as grounds for concern, critique, and construction of new ideas.'

Source: Abstract.

'Bella Li’s writing engages in intertextual ways with philosophy, cartography and writing by other poets and from a diasporic perspective she also engages inventively with Australian literary tropes. Focusing on two poems from Li’s chapbook Maps, Cargo (2013), “Just Then” and “Drowning Dream,” I argue that these poems use intertextual references to enact a form of diasporic place-making through the creation of doubled places. Each of the poems references a poet from the United States of America, John Ashbery for “Just Then” and Anne Sexton for “Drowning Dream,” but each poem also complicates this reference via diasporic citational practices. In the poems this complication, and the act of place-making, is carried out through depictions of water. The doubled properties of water as depicted in these poems are able to offer transformation and reflection, something which allows the doubleness of diasporic place-making to emerge through the intertextuality of the poems. This artistic practice in turn adds a significant diasporic viewpoint to Australian literary criticism about place.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This essay examines Bela Li’s Argosy, Max Ernst’s collage novels and China Miéville’s The Last Days of New Paris in relation to an ideology of realism in which the recuperation of avantgarde praxis stands in direct relation to its de-sublimation of an aesthetics of sur-realism. In Li and Miéville’s solicitation of Ernst’s texts, among others, there is a deep ambivalence between the economy of a return to the origin as avant-primitivism and its affordances as (fundamentalist) reaction, in which the antipodeanism of Li’s refiguring of Surrealism describes an exemplary movement. Such antipodeanism also implies a critique of the somewhat paradoxical observation that, “As for the productions of peoples who are still subject to cultural colonialism (often caused by political oppression), even though they may be progressive in their own countries, they play a reactionary role in advanced cultural countries” (Debord, “Report on the Construction” 20).'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This paper addresses the search for an Australian authenticity and differentiation in the work of the South Australian-based Jindyworobak group of poets who, in the late 1930s, sought to escape from the “intellectual colonialism of modernism.” Influenced by D.H. Lawrence’s “spirit of place” they promoted, through their 1938 Manifesto and influential annual Jindyworobak Anthology (1938-1953), local and environmental values drawing on topoi from inland Australian landscapes and motifs from imagined indigenous life and language, largely unknown to most Australian settlers. While their experiment was mainly unsuccessful, the paper shows how Jindyworobak sympathies for “a neglected people” foreshadow the return to indigenous themes and forms in settler writing from the 1980s, notably by Les Murray, David Malouf and Alex Miller. The paper underlines, nonetheless, the sensitivities surrounding writing about the Other. It points to Malouf’s interest, as a writer of non-English language descent, in the loss of language, a variant of “homelessness,” recurring in contemporary settler and migrant writing, and central to the work of Aboriginal writer Kim Scott.'

Source: Abstract.

'Seeking to fully know the other can have the effect of minimising the wholly different gestalt of the other’s lifeworld. This mode of knowing can thereby be a means of reduction, generalisation, possession, and control. In this essay, the author analyses a contemporary ethnography of Warlpiri women’s song-poems, Jardiwanpa Yawulyu: Warlpiri Women’s Songs from Yuendumu (2014). This ethnography is theorised as a mode of open text that animates a collision of epistemologies: those of Western settler culture, and those of the Warlpiri women who collaboratively authored the book. The author emphasises the cultural lenses that she brings to the intellectual and emotional work of reflexive close reading, and insists that her own position as whitefella, settler, Westerner, combined with the necessary partiality of the text, renders her incapable of any sort of comprehensive access to the ‘total poem,’ the ritual situation, which the
book represents.'

Source: Abstract.