AustLit
History
Notes
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The A. D. Hope Prize is awarded for the best postgraduate paper submitted to JASAL after the previous year's ASAL conference.
Latest Winners / Recipients
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Year: 2015
winner Salvador Torrents and The Birth of 'Crónica' Writing in Australia 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 3 2015;'Creative writing in Australian Spanish-language newspapers has to date taken many forms, from short stories to poems, from memoirs to crónicas. Crónicas are writings that comment on the happenings of daily life, social habits and the concerns of communities, at times employing humour and satire while at others adopting a more sombre tone. Crónicas are a significant genre because they serve the reading community by touching on many of the themes that resonate with the migrant experience.
'While Spanish-language crónicas first appeared in Australian newspapers in the 1970s, their origins in this country were established much earlier by a Spanish migrant from Catalonia, Salvador Torrents. Torrents fled persecution as a result of his involvement in anarchist politics and arrived in Australia in 1916, working in the sugar cane fields near Innisfail, North Queensland. Up until his death in 1952 he wrote profusely in a variety of genres, including the crónica, and his work was published in European and North American newspapers. This study examines the way in which Torrents’ writings on politics, family life, social customs and gender relations informed an international audience, projecting the migrant’s perspective of an Australian experience to a worldwide readership.' (Publication abstract)
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Year: 2014
winner Beyond Generation Green : Jill Jones and the Ecopoetic Process 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 14 no. 3 2014;'‘I don’t belong to generation green,’ announces Jill Jones in her poem ‘Leaving It To the Sky’ (Dark Bright Doors, 2010); and in her blog Ruby Street she has voiced her discomfort with having her work seen as embodying ‘a form of comfortable ecopoetic with some fancy philosophic or metaphysical flourishes’. In ‘Leaving It To the Sky’, her narrator writes instead of an equivocal relationship to a particular city, memories of a suburban working-class childhood, and the need to avoid being allocated to any school of thinking, any ‘overarching narrative’, at all. The poem is not primarily concerned with landscape or the natural world, but opens itself to difference and contradiction, leaps of association, a refusal to be disciplined into membership of an accepted group of concerned writers.
'This paper will consider how Jill Jones tackles the ecopoetic as process rather than category. Using the work of Walter Benjamin and Timothy Morton, I argue that the ecopoetic in this sense may have little to do with a traditional sense of ‘nature’ – which has been absorbed, in Joan Retallack’s words, ‘into literary tropes and musings fed by chronically ego-bound, short-sighted human desires’. Instead, as this paper will demonstrate, Jones often reaches out to otherness, incorporating the languages of popular culture, journalism, politics, technology and the corporate: an experiment in contemporary consciousness, the human and the non-human inextricably entwined.' (Publication abstract)
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Year: 2013
winner In/On/Of – The Mixed Poetics of Australian Spaces; or How I Found the Cubby. A Fictocritical Essay on White Australian (Un)Belonging 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 13 no. 2 2013; 'The white Australian relationship with landscape is complicated by notions of belonging and ‘unbelonging’; while literary representations are often marked by complex, conflicting emotions. Defining and shaping these relationships are the prepositions with which we characterize separate spaces, each one signalling a different power balance and attitude, linked directly through language to the colonial past. Responding to the poetics of Australian spaces put forward in Jennifer Rutherford’s and Barbara Holloway’s Halfway House, this paper offers the heterotopia as one possible re-conceptualization of Australian space. Heterotopias focus on that which functions above and beyond the everyday, combining internal (emotional) and external (physical) constructions of space to create sites of importance to society. They juxtapose the fixed with the mutable and create a discourse of relation between the various spaces of our world. The cubby is such a space of juxtaposition, closed and intimate in its nature as a highly personal space, and yet simultaneously based within wider social relations and part of a highly normative childhood experience. In examining the cubby as a heterotopic space through a fictocritical remembrance of my own childhood, this paper attempts to represent both the complexity of belonging as a sensation for white Australians and the ‘heterochronic’ reality of the postcolonial nation.' (Author's abstract) -
Year: 2012
winner Unsettling the Field : Christopher Brennan and Biodiversity 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 12 no. 1 2012; 'In this paper I consider the ecological term 'biodiversity' as a metaphor within that of the more generally metaphorical term 'field', specifically in relation to Christopher Brennan's work the Musicopoematographoscope. The term 'field', in the literary context may not preclude, but does not suggest biodiversity: suggesting rather evenness, tamedness, industry, fighting or sport - and settledness. I use the ecological figure of biodiversity not as an indication of a relation between writing (poetry) and natural environments per se, but to signal an attention to survival. A literature that can be compared to a biodiverse ecosystem - rather than a field - suggests the wholeness that health is derived from. I draw on and critique the work of American poet Charles Olson and English critic Jonathan Bate.' (Author's abstract)
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Year: 2009
winner Instruction for an Ideal Australian : John Forbes’s Poetry of Metaphysical Etiquette 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , Special Issue 2010;'The question of value in poetry or poetry of value often resolves to a question of metaphysics: what goes in to a poem or how it carries its symbolic freight will tell of the poetics involved in the practice, more particularly how the poem might function as a specular technology. Crudely, we might say that some poems are written as paeans to the ephemera of the world by a sovereign soul that is tonally and formally certain of a metaphysical guarantee (even in the expression of uncertainty), either through theosophy, 'pious self-regard,' or just good luck. There are other poems, not pagan exactly, but which seem to have an appetite for the material-historical circumstances of the world in which they find themselves, that go for the world in its lurid contingency, where there might be a wilful and cheeky inclusion of things that are not only ephemeral but redundant to good taste, thereby threatening the traditional sacred territory of the poetic itself.
By way of luxuriating in the habitus of his work, this paper argues that the poetry of John Forbes presents a reformed metaphysic of surfaces that, far from flattening 'deeper' concerns of literature, offers a new kind of etiquette for the spirit by which our perception, symbolic inception, and response to the world is a constant kind of poesis, or creative production of our selves that is at once more lively and Ideally less delusional. It will examine Forbes's conception of poetry as the ultimate technology for regulating and playing with the processes of self-mythologising by fiercely interrogating the symbolic economies, or the textural architectonics of communities, from which selves are made and through which they are cultivated as beings of language.' (Author's abstract)
