AustLit

McPherson explores how Sonya Hartnett's Sleeping Dogs reflects the binary positionality of Julia Kristeva's exposition of abjection and the Oedipal stage of a child's psycho-sexual development, through each of the text's characters, all of which embody the abject in some way (15). She begins with a consideration of Kristeva's theory of abjection, which 'maps the physical and psychical develoment of the subject from an abject borderline state' to its insertion within the symbolic order as a 'speaking subject' (15). She explains how the 'ability to take up a symbolic position as a social and speaking subject is predicated upon the subjects rejection of the borderline, the unpredicatable, the ambiguous and the unclean' (15). While the Oedipul drama in Sleeping Dogs concerns the son's love for the daughter/sister rather than the mother/lover, McPherson argues that fundamentally, the narrative reinforces the status quo of patriarchal dominance, particularly as 'the powerless and abject maternal stands in constant, inadequate opposition to the paternal rule governing the symbolic order' (21).

Halliday examines the function of place in Out of the Dust by American writer Karen Hesse and A Place Like This by Steven Herrick, arguing that the unknown places found in children's poetry are 'linked to worlds of fantasy and make-believe and are similarly delineated by clearly recognizable elements' (30). She points out that notions of place are more clearly defined in poetry for children because 'place is a repository for many of the ideologies that permeate poetry that is written and chosen for children' (30). Halliday argues that the texts discussed exemplify the use of the postmodern literary techniques, self-reflexivity and intertextuality, and in doing so reinforce the on-going and intrinsic association of place and structures of childhood in ways that not only define 'place' but empower and validate the idea that 'through the interaction of with something natural it is possible to come to an understanding of oneself' (36-37).