Paper: Reading together, navigating change: Genre fiction and place-making in the Victorian Mallee
Co-authored by Emily Potter.

Abstract: Shared reading practices are one literary means by which communities can make sense of their changing world, including pressing environmental and social transformations. This paper will consider the ways in which reading together specific place-related literatures enable reflections, conversations, and re-imaginings amongst several groups of regional readers in the Victorian Mallee. In particular, we argue that it is works of genre fiction that can generate these exchanges and creative processes, intersecting thematically, formally and narratively with the challenging conditions that climate crisis and related demographic, social and economic changes are bringing to Mallee communities. The paper will discuss the findings from book groups that focused on three different genre types – climate fiction, western fiction, and neuro-inclusive fiction – and engaged with both young adult and mature age readers.

Bio: Brigid Magner is Associate Professor in Literary Studies and founding member of the non/fictionLab at RMIT University. Her monograph Locating Australian Literary Memory was published by Anthem Press in 2019. She is the book reviews editor of the Literary Geographies journal.

Paper: Re-turning memories: Chaos and Order in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, A family Tragicomic

Abstract: This paper is part of my PhD thesis chapter titled Re-turning memories: Chaos and Order in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, A family Tragicomic. Alison Bechdel re/visits her father’s memories in her first graphic memoir to understand his identity and in doing so she tries to understand her self and acknowledges her identity. She calls her memoir a “conflicted elegy for my exasperating father” (Gardiner). In order to critically evaluate her graphic memoir, I am using Karen Barad’s concept of re-turning. It is related to her theory of diffraction. According to Barad, Returning is associated with reflection so returning to past in that sense is going back to what was once linear time but “re-turning in research involves always already being entangled with/in a world that is not at distance” (Bozalik). Alison Bechdel chooses to go into the chaos of her father’s past trying to decode his life through the intra-action of books he read, his photographs, his interaction with their babysitters, his relationship with her mother etc. and it is only going within the eye of the storm could she bring order in her life. In her book proposal she explains that she has structured her book chapters in the form of a labyrinth. The initial chapters spiral in until she reaches the core of chaos, their ‘shared homosexuality’ and last chapters spiral out as they share a brief moment of ‘concomitance’ before he kills himself. This chaos and order are entangled in her graphic memoir and its only through re-turning this entanglement she could make sense of her self and identity.  

Bio: Aisha Makhdoom is a PhD candidate within the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. Her research interests includes literary theory focusing on the study of graphic memoirs from Pakistan and North America, understanding concepts of self, identity and home in them.

Paper: Chaos in the Archive: Remixing James McAuley

Abstract: This hybrid creative-critical paper revisits the later work of James McAuley, particularly his Tasmanian poems through the lens of his archival materials held at the State Library of New South Wales. Using McAuley’s and (Harold Stewart’s) own early poetic method of collage (pastiche?), it stages poetic conflicts between texts to bring into question the environmental, conservationist, ethos of McAuley’s later years. Neither poetic biography or poetic autobiography, through form and method it catapults my own family history, archive and understandings of McAuley’s Tasmanian spaces against his through site-specific writing, bringing the archives back into their originating places.

Bio: Dr Caitlin Maling is a lecturer in creative writing at Curtin University in Western Australia. She has published five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Spore or Seed (Fremantle Press, 2023). She was the holder of the inaugural 2023 James McAuley Creative Fellowship from the University of Tasmania.

Paper: How to Make a Man: Resisting Fixed Order with Jean Toomer’s Scrapbook (1914-17)

Abstract: Jean Toomer is best remembered for his novel Cane (1923), which is regarded as one of the definitive works of the Harlem Renaissance. His later publications would not reach the same heights or readership, with Toomer largely abandoning fiction in favour of Eastern mysticism and psychology. However, his papers at the Beinecke Library contain a wealth of unpublished autobiographical materials, essays, and creative works. Of particular interest is a personal scrapbook made by a college-age Toomer (1914-17), which has not received widespread attention from scholars, but which reveals visual clues for how Toomer’s developing modernism in Cane was shaped by earlier interactions between, and understanding of, racialised discourse and bodily morphologies.

Alongside personal photographs, Toomer included physical culture (bodybuilding) figures like Bernard MacFadden and Eugene Sandow, pasted alongside classical statuary: Michelangelo’s David, Hercules Farnese, and Apollo Belvedere. There is even a page devoted to Marrickville’s “Diving Venus,” Annette Kellermann. By examining this scrapbook, it is possible to see how Cane’s bodies were cultivated and formed by Toomer’s interests in the art world and physical culture, and how Toomer’s resistance to a fixed social order based in racial essentialism connected ideas of corporeal transformation, individual subjectivity, and artistic agency.

Bio: Jessica Masters is a PhD candidate in English at University of Sydney, and works on literary modernism, intermediality, and form. She is co-editor of the Book Reviews section for The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945 journal and the Postgraduate Convenor for The Novel Network (University of Sydney, affiliated with Duke University).

Paper: the writing body

Abstract: Interlaced within the seemingly intact and ordered entity of the written work are writing’s instances. In conceptualising writing’s labour as articulation, simultaneously formation and fragmentation, the written work is fragmented into writing inescapably intertwined with the writing body. This decomposition of composition is expressed through articulations of memory and forgetting instigated by writing bodies – reflectivity corporealizing composition. Calculated forgetting is embedded within the settler-colonial state viciously seeking to implement colonial order in instructing the order to overwhelm sovereignty of First Nations peoples and their enduring histories into immaterial obscurity. Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork (2018) materialises remembering and forgetting as imbued with resistant and chaotic movement – impressions imparted and traced by her writing body, exacting an overwhelming of her being overwhelmed into absence through colonialism’s deliberate corrosion of memory. In resistance, Blakwork dismembers/disremembers forgetting, simultaneously revealing the written work and settler-colonial state as inherently unsettled, chaotically fractured in fabricated formation. 

Bio: Having completed dual bachelor degrees in Art Theory and Arts, I am now a postgraduate student currently undertaking my PhD at UNSW with a thesis tentatively titled Reading and rupturing coloniality and the undead in contemporary decolonial and First Nations poetics. 

Paper: Wrangling Chaos: The use of lists in women’s contemporary non-fiction narratives

Abstract:

In a literary context, lists seem to embody a lack of story; one often skips lists in novels because they do not seem to move the events forward.
—Lucie Doležalová (The charm of a list: from the Sumerians to computerised data processing, 2009)

Under the binary of chaos and order, lists belong to the latter; they are a technology for organisation, maintenance and quotidian life. The placement of a list in a narrative text might indeed be a foil for progression, a mode of eventlessness to punctuate the action, a practicality to curtail sentimentality. They are mundane yet ephemeral; in short, lists can destabilise narrative time and reorient attention towards the smaller scale and the domestic. This paper considers the use of lists in the ‘quiet’ space of women’s contemporary non-fiction narratives, particularly the work of Annie Ernaux, who contends in her short text, Exteriors (1996) that ‘a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall.’

Bio: Dr Beth McLean is a Lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research and teaching interests include theories and histories of the novel, particularly its moments of realism, decadence and modernism. Her doctoral thesis looked at Henry James’s use of the parenthetical as a method of prioritising marginal experiences, of queerness, femininity and childhood. She is currently working on a project about eventlessness, domesticity and maintenance in 20th century women’s non-fiction.

Paper: Women’s literature: Crossing cultural and linguistic borders with feminist transnational/translation

Abstract: Women’s literature has always grappled with the patriarchal order, which likewise manifests itself in the perennial male dominance in literary translation. In the past 15 years, women authors accounted for only 30 percent1 of translated fiction. Feminist translation studies (FTS) seeks to disrupt this (im)balance. The task involves not only closing the disproportionate gap but, more so, challenging phallocentric language and gender constructs, facilitating feminist production, and making women’s literary work visible and recognized as equally important.2 Of its three waves so far, FTS has struggled, firstly, to fight the patriarchy; secondly, to incorporate the intersections of race, class, and gender; currently, to cross cultural and linguistic borders farther in the Global South from the perspective of transnational feminism. The task of the transnational feminist translator is to re-claim, rather than disrupt, the order that had positioned women in the center, rather than in the margins, prior to colonialism.

Bio: Eileen Meneses is currently working on her dissertation in translation studies under the PhD Filipino (Pagsasalin) program of the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, back to the national university’s flagship campus from which she also graduated B.A. Journalism. She obtained her master’s degree in Communication Arts at the UP Los Baños Department of Humanities, where she is concurrently an assistant professor teaching courses on communication, writing, research, and English. Her research interests include interlanguage, language and gender, media studies, populist discourse, and translation studies particularly focusing on transnational feminist translation theory and praxis.

Paper: Beyond Order and Chaos: Alternative Methods for Reading Indigenous Poetry

Abstract: Chaos and order are loaded terms. The colonial order, for instance, refers to violent attempts to categorise knowledge about the world; anything that does not conform is chaotic. Revealing the order within an undefinable system can undermine colonialism and contribute to decolonisation – disrupting assumptions about, for example, Indigenous people and culture. And yet such projects use order as a mark of value and respectability, not entirely escaping colonial logic.

This paper follows alternative methods for engaging with recent poetry and criticism by Indigenous poets such as Evelyn Araluen (Goorie / Koori) and Alison Whittaker (Gomeroi). The paper will examine two poems and argue that the critical and poetic work of Indigenous writers rehabilitates the (sometimes hidden) assumptions underpinning traditional models of poetic appreciation. Through counter-archival work, community connection, healing and gathering, Indigenous writers resist categorisation, writing beyond the colonial order of romantic or political literature.

Bio: Dr Benjamin Miller (University of Sydney) has published on representations of blackness and Aboriginality in US and Australian theatre, film, music and writing. His work explores the alternative modes of rhetoric used by Indigenous artists, from David Unaipon (Ngarrindjeri) to A.B. Original.

Paper: English Prose Satire at Mid-Century

Abstract: Both Evelyn Waugh and W. H. Auden argued, separately, that satire could not ‘flourish’ in the twentieth century – a century which they saw as characterised by ‘vice’ (Waugh) and ‘evil’ (Auden).  Both argued that satire needed a ‘stable’, ‘homogeneous’ society, with shared values and views. Yet mid-century England saw a flourishing of satire, a mode that is not itself homogeneous. Mid-century satire was conservative and progressive; community-minded and self-obsessed; right and left. What united mid-century writers, Lyndsey Stonebridge and Marina MacKay write, was ‘grim humour’.

This paper will outline the contours of English satiric practice at mid-century, through four themes: social levelling, extreme politics, the unsettling of institutions, and the erasure of the self. Thinking about prose satire as a distinctive but heterogeneous expressive practice, allows for a picture to emerge of the relationship between satire and the rapid changes and mounting divisions in social, economic, and political reality that were occurring during the years 1930-1960.

Bio: Dr Naomi Milthorpe is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania. She is the author of Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts (FDUP, 2016) and editor of The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times (Rowman, 2019). She is preparing a scholarly edition of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, volume 3 in the Oxford University Press Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.

Paper: Postcolonial Singularities in the Search for non-Order

Abstract: While postcolonial scholars have often defined a singularity by the gravity of a colonial culture, the concept re-emerges at precisely the moment colonial narratives of canonicity become challenged. In the pursuit of non-order, a range of postcolonial writers reiterate their own projective, yet, encapsulating visions of the world. For example, when Martinican poet and essayist Edouard Glissant rebukes the idea of a single origin of culture for “an unprecedented potential for contact” (Caribbean Discourse 17), he defines his argument through a footnoted map of “situations for all to see”, noting “The slow death of the aborigines of Australia” (18-19). Peter Hallward once likened this effect to Glissant’s singularity, reducing distant cultures to fit the terms of relation (441). While Glissant’s repeated, spiral retellings complicates Hallward’s ordered critique of ‘early’ and ‘late’, this claim sets the scene for this paper: a study of the discursive limits of non-ordered world-making visions. This paper explores the literary manifestations of postcolonial singularity in Caribbean writings on Aboriginal Australia by Glissant, Shiva Naipaul, and Wilson Harris, drawing from a recent monograph (Moore 2024).  

Bio: Dashiell Moore is an early career researcher at the University of Sydney. His research interests include world literature, island studies, postcolonial theory, and Indigenous studies, with a particular concentration in modern and contemporary American, Caribbean, Australian, and Pacific writing. Recent publications include The Literary Mirroring of Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean (OUP 2024). He is currently exploring further research in literary representations of relation, encounter, and spatial mappings, and is currently coediting a scholarly volume of essays on the poetry of Lionel Fogarty, entitled Lionel Fogarty in Poetry and Politics (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan).

Paper: Dorothy Hewett and the brief, shining life of Sydney’s Paris Theatre

Abstract: The Paris Theatre was a glorious but doomed experiment launched by the big names of 1970s Sydney. In 1978, impresario Jim Sharman returned from London, with The Rocky Horror Show enjoying worldwide success. Sick of suitcases, he wanted to invest in Australian culture, so with high-profile collaborators and the city’s best-known actors, he set up a new theatre, in the old Paris Theatre building on Oxford Street. The vision was to fuse artistic integrity, new Australian content and large audiences, in a cooperative company of members rather than employees. Patrick White declared, “I think this could tap a public who has never known theatre.”

Pandora’s Cross, a new play by Dorothy Hewett, launched it. But opening night was a disaster and within two weeks it was clear the whole enterprise would collapse. One of the most spectacular flops in Australian theatre history, Pandora’s Cross at the Paris Theatre tells us much about the dreams encoded in late seventies culture and what the end of that world looked like on the stage.

Bio: Nicole Moore is finishing a biography of playwright, poet and novelist Dorothy Hewett, and working with Christina Spittel on a history of mid-century leftwing publisher the Australasian Book Society, funded by the Australian Research Council. She has ongoing interests in comparing book censorship regimes internationally, particularly with help from scholars in Portugal and Germany. She is Professor of English and Media Studies at UNSW Canberra and in 2022-2023 she was the Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo.

Paper: Unveiling Complexity: Rethinking the Australian Literary Canon through Archival Networks

Abstract: This presentation explores innovative approaches to archival research within Australian cultural institutions, aiming to reassess and reframe the Australian literary canon. It acknowledges that archives – particularly colonial archives – are marked by inherent complexities, both violence and notable omission and silence. This presentation recognises the need for methods that not only revisit and revaluate the canon itself but also critically address the infrastructures and tangible materials upon which such scholarly work relies. Focusing on the archival connections among Australian writers, the project utilises data from Finding Aids and catalogue records from archival collections across Australia’s State and National Libraries. By constructing a literary network, it contrasts the structured nature of literary canons and archival systems with the ‘chaos’ of vast, often overlooked interconnections that shape literary status and heritage. This approach unveils new perspectives for cultural historians and archival practices, particularly through the visualization of omissions and silences, thereby offering fresh insights into the dynamics that influence literary recognition and historical narratives.

Bio: Fiannuala Morgan is a Lecturer in Publishing and Communications in the School of Culture and Communications  at The University of Melbourne and comes from a background in the information services industry where she been employed as a librarian and archivist for over a decade. Her research explores the possibilities that artificial intelligence yields for the analysis of digitalised cultural collections with a particular interest in the Australian colonial press.

Paper: Reading Racial Transformation in Early Colonial Sydney Writing

Abstract: This paper utilises an 1809 Sydney Gazette poem and critical race studies to understand racial transformation in early colonial Sydney. Starting with ‘A Strange Mistake’—in which a white woman seemingly transforms into an African man—I examine how early colonial Sydney existed in a transnational world of Black migration, subjugation, and polyvalent artistic representation. Early settler culture produced a multifaceted Blackness in the early colony as simultaneously global and local, enslaved and free, and tragic and comic. While imagining turning Black themselves, in their letters and newspaper columns, settlers envisioned ‘whitening’ young Eora into industrious and pious settlers via Native Schools and expected an Indigenous Black presence to die out. Developing recent work on early colonial poetry (Clemens and Ford 2023) this paper demonstrates that early Sydney writing enriches our understanding of the globally-situated town and encapsulates a fluid and often contradictory racial politics articulated in service to settler-colonial order. 

Bio: Dr Hannah Lauren Murray researches nineteenth-century American and Australian literature and teaches at the University of Melbourne. Her first book Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction examines fluid and precarious whiteness in American fiction 1798-1857, and she has been published in English, Humanities, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, The New Wiley Companion to Herman Melville and The Oxford Handbook of Charles Brockden Brown. She is currently researching ideas of racial transformation in colonial Australian writing and has an article on Ernest Favenc’s short fiction forthcoming in Gothic Studies. 

Paper: Narrative Order and Climate Chaos: Locating Literature within the Crisis of Climate Change Communication

Abstract: Humans, as communications theorist Walter R. Fisher said, are homo narrans. We rely upon narrative as a cognitive faculty to order and make sense of the world. Literary narratives exemplify this idea as representational artefacts that structure experience. So too does narrative in the sense of strategic storytelling: an instrumentalised tool and ‘masterplot’ that frames events for a particular persuasive effect, or communicates complex phenomena in clear and ‘tellable’ ways. But the climate crisis poses a problem to this attempt at order, where its complex spatiotemporality resists the causal logic of normative narrative templates. While this tension between narrative and crisis—between order and chaos—is well-understood, what deserves more consideration is how the distinct understandings of narrative outlined above overlap across the different networked ecosystems of science communication, politics, social media, and environmental activism. By considering this we may more accurately ask, what are the affordances of narrative ‘order’ across different communicative platforms? And when does this ‘order’ ironically fuel chaos by exacerbating misunderstanding? 

Bio: I am a PhD student at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, whose research explores a transmedial approach to narrative and the climate crisis across genres and media. Beyond this, I work as a research assistant for Dr Paul Dawson, UNSW, on a funded project entitled “Narrative in the Networked Public Sphere.” 

Paper: “It doesn’t get any more real than this”: the American Fiction of Percival Everett

Abstract: Percival Everett’s reworking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn –  James – may soon prove to be the most acclaimed (and commercially successful) of the many works of fiction which he has published over the past forty years. Previously, his best-known novel was arguably Erasure (2001), a complex satire directed at the publishing and media industries. Like Everett himself the protagonist of Erasure, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, is a writer and professor of English literature based in California. Through the travails of Monk, who is constantly informed that his writing is not “black enough”, Everett trenchantly critiques the entrenched stereotypes of African Americans in the culture of the United States. Cord Jefferson’s recent adaptation of Erasure into the film ‘American Fiction’ won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 2023, drawing further attention to Everett’s whole oeuvre. A reconsideration of Erasure, read alongside ‘American Fiction’ and James, is pertinent at this time.

Bio: Heather Neilson has taught in the English and Media Studies program at UNSW, Canberra for many years. In 2025 she will join the new Indo-Pacific program in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her main area of specialisation is American Studies. Her monograph, Political Animal: Gore Vidal on Power (2014), was published by Monash University Press. She is a past president of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association and a former editor of the Australasian Journal of American Studies. Her current research focusses on the legacy of Gore Vidal and on the life writing of Vidal’s protégé Jay Parini.

Paper: That “unnamed land”: creative-critical scholarship as a response to settler colonial order in the work of Randolph Stow

Abstract: Reading the work of mid-century white Australian writers such as Randolph Stow can pose significant and troubling questions for contemporary critics, in particular those likewise negotiating a consciousness of their own settler-colonial subjectivity. The logic of erasure inherent to much of Stow’s writing is imbricated in an imperial system of power, which effectively imposes colonial order on the landscape as represented. In reading, this extends beyond the text, to maintain that same order in (popular) cultural discourse. As Munanjahli and South Sea Islander author and academic Chelsea Watego makes clear, in reading Stow’s work, “The canon of Australian literature, we are reminded, is to be of service to the coloniser, not the colonised, and Black bodies get conjured up in the most vile and fanciful ways to aid it, with absolutely no accountability.” (Another Day in the Colony, 64) There is a scholarly imperative, thus, in reading such writing, to resist the continuation of colonial logic. This paper will consider the possibilities for the contemporary white Australian critic in responding to Stow’s work, focusing particularly on the chaos of creative-critical scholarship as a domain in which such structures of order might productively be undermined. 

Bio: Catherine Noske is a senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Western Australia. Her work has been awarded the A.D. Hope Prize and (twice) the Elyne Mitchell Prize for Rural Women Writers. Her debut novel The Salt Madonna (Picador, 2020) was shortlisted in the 2021 WA Premier’s Book Awards.

Paper: The chaos of literary autonomy: Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac

Abstract: The concept of national literature has long been a cornerstone of literary categorisation. Yet, given conceptions on what constitutes ‘the national’ are socially constructed and ordered, how do we make sense of the chaos produced by literary autonomy, such as when a text departs (or annihilates) established formal, linguistic, cultural, racial, or geographical national associations? I will address these questions of method and theory through an analysis of Chilean author Benjamín Labatut and his most recent book The Maniac (Pushkin Press, 2023). This book, which was written first in English and then self-translated into Spanish, is framed around global issues and questions about the future of humanity through three historical narratives: the descent into madness of physicist Paul Ehrenfest, the life of Hungarian mathematical genius John von Neumann (and father of modern Artificial Intelligence) and his legacy in the showdown between an AI AlphaGo and Korean Go Grandmaster Lee Sedol in 2016. Is this Chilean literature? How does international and national reception produce this work? What does this tell us about the autonomy or heteronomy of the Chilean literary field now, and how it has evolved since the 20th Century? 

Bio: Dr. Thomas Nulley-Valdés is Lecturer in Spanish Studies at the Australian National University. He is an emerging scholar of World Literature with a focus on Spanish and Latin American literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries. His research features in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Theory Now, Chasqui, JILAR, 1616: Anuario de literatura comparada, and Latin American Literature Today. His first monograph is McOndo Revisited: The Making of a Generation Defining Anthology in the Latin American Literature-World (Lexington, 2023). He tweets as @TNulleyValdes. 

Paper:  The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and middle class financial failure in colonial Australia 

Abstract: Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony evokes canonical Victorian novels in which bankruptcy played a central role. In this tradition, writers such as Dickens and Eliot employed the trope of bankruptcy to explore the psychologically corrosive effects of capitalism on their bourgeois characters. Like these writers, Richardson offers a sympathetic portrait of a man who is unsuited to the prosaic task of moneymaking. The trilogy narrates Mahony’s ill-fated attempts to establish a career as a medical doctor.  His ultimate breakdown is attributed, in part, to his own eccentricities: ‘superstitious’ musings and ‘strange fears’ he has brought with him from Ireland to the goldfields. Yet Richardson also situates Mahony’s decline in the specific context of the Australian colony – a society in which his vocation brings ‘neither honour nor glory’ and ‘only brawn ha[s] value’. This paper reads Richard Mahony as a distinctively colonial narrative of middle class financial failure.   

Bio: Dr Lucinda O’Brien is a postdoctoral fellow at Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne. She holds degrees in Arts and Law and a PhD in English literature, all from the University of Melbourne. In collaboration with colleagues at Melbourne Law School she has published extensively on Australian bankruptcy law. Her postdoctoral project, commencing in 2024, will be an interdisciplinary study of bankruptcy in Australian law and literature, from 1788 to the present. 

Paper: Decolonial reading: Disturbing the order of literary studies

Abstract: These last few years have produced an array of texts from both pedagogical and theoretical perspectives about the decolonisation of literary studies, including Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018) and Anna Bernard’s Decolonising Literature (2023). Such works speak to the growing relevance of decolonial perspectives within literary studies, but questions remain about how decolonial reading methods can be applied beyond the North American context. Arguing for a decolonial ethics of interpretation, this paper reads the Senegalese text Taajabóon Tubaab (2011) by Samba Sine in conjunction with an adaptation of Capricornia (2006) by Indigenous playwright Wesley Enoch. In doing so, I discuss the decentralisation of the written text, localised analysis, referencing and placenaming, linguistic awareness and researcher reflexivity. Sometimes chaos (the introduction of decolonial reading methods) can bring forth an ethical order to our research methods, informed by our postcolonial situations. 

Bio: Charlotte Okkes-Sane is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include postcolonial theory, Indigenous studies, critical race and whiteness studies, Senegalese “texts”, Wolof literature and francophone studies. She holds a Masters in Etudes Culturelles (Cultural Studies) from the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III, France and a Bachelor’s in European Languages and Cultures from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands. Her PhD thesis focuses on contemporary whiteface performances in Senegal and Australia.  

Paper: Making It Pay: Freelance Writers in the Australian Marketplace, 1920-1960

Abstract: This paper examines the travails of authorship in Australia during a period of time in which syndicated English and American content was a much cheaper option for newspapers and magazines, leaving limited opportunities for Australian writers to see their work in print. From the mid-1920s, freelance writers were directly addressed in instruction manuals such as Why Editors Regret (First Aid for the Free-Lance) (1929), as well as being courted by the advertisements of correspondence schools. Advice for freelancers concentrated on paragraphs, articles and short stories, but also the aspiring novelist. Reflecting on this advice and using serialised novels from the To Be Continued database, this paper will examine the life and work of a few writers whose novels were published primarily or only in newspapers. Foregrounding such writers opens a space just beneath the surface of previous literary histories, providing a better understanding of what Australians read on an everyday basis, and a more comprehensive account of Australian authorship for this period than that offered by literary histories focussed only on book publication.

Bio: Roger Osborne is Associate Professor of English Literature at James Cook University, Cairns. He is the author of The Life of Such is Life: A Cultural History of an Australian Classic (2022) and co-author of Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace, 1840s–1940s.

Paper: ‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times’: Ekphrasis in Ali Smith’s Novels as a Method to Contemporary Madness

Abstract: The proposed presentation examines the ways in which interruptions made by various art forms, like cinema and paintings, help characters in Ali Smith’s novels The Accidental (2005) and the Seasonal quartet (2016-20) negotiate with contemporary crises, be it the urgency of the refugee crises discussed in Spring and Summer, or the slow-burn of post-Brexit life in Autumn and Winter. It attempts to discuss the role of ekphrasis in bringing chaos to The Accidental and order to the Seasonal quartet.

In The Accidental, the heterodiegetic narration of Alhambra on the history of 20th century cinema makes her the metaleptic other of Amber, the uninvited guest in the Smarts’ home. Her interruptions in the multi-narrative introduce further chaos in attempts to decode the contentious nature of their relationship. The presentation reads Alhambra’s commentary in the novel in terms of its metonymic function that allows cinema to puncture through narrative traditions in the novel. It also discusses Smith’s record-breaking publishing speed of all the novels in her Seasonal quartet as a method to bring order to contemporary chaos. 

Bio: Nishtha Pandey is a doctoral research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century literature and philosophy, postcolonial literatures and critical race theory, memory studies and affect studies. Her doctoral project looks at the affective registers of loss in the face of crisis in the works of contemporary authors like Elena Ferrante, Olga Tokarczuk, Jenny Erpenbeck, Ali Smith, and Rachel Cusk. She can be contacted at nishthapandey7@gmail.com. 

Paper: Literary Resistance to a Deranged Prison Logic in Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains

Abstract: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018) is a memoir about imprisonment in an offshore detention camp on Manus Island for asylum seekers seeking refuge in Australia. Boochani describes the prison system as governed by a “deranged logic,” which the prisoners internalize, resulting in a fragmented sense of self and a search of cognitive order amid chaos. Through systems theory, particularly the work of Gregory Bateson, this paper examines Boochani’s assertion that immersion in a system inherently limits one’s capacity to fully comprehend its workings at a rational and conventionally analytical level. Boochani’s turn towards a literary and aesthetic response, a formal blend of sensory experience and rational thought, is not only a means to navigate the complex experience but to capture a form of thinking born out of and as a response to an oppressive system. 

Bio: Eliis Maria Peters is pursuing her PhD in contemporary English Literature, while also holding the position of teaching assistant at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Presently, she is a Visiting Doctoral Student at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), School of Arts and Media, supported by a grant from the Swiss Government. Her doctoral research focuses on aesthetic education in contemporary refugee narratives and is situated at the intersection of critical pedagogy and refugee studies theory. 

Paper: Naming, knowing, not knowing: an exploration of science and literature in contemporary environmental creative nonfiction

Abstract: What does literary knowledge of the natural world look like in contemporary environmental creative nonfiction? Writers working in this genre often present factual, scientific modes of writing alongside personal, lyrical reflections to create engaging, hybrid narratives. Can this approach challenge the art|science binary, or does it reinscribe the binary by continuing to assert the dominance of Western scientific knowledge over other ways of knowing about the natural world? Scottish ecocritic Timothy C. Baker recognises this trend in literary ecocriticism about climate change: “while sciences are presented as having access to ‘facts’, the humanities are valued for their ability to encourage readers to relate to those facts. These formulations, while well intended, often present literature as a second-order form of knowledge: scientists understand the world, while writers reflect it” (Baker 2023, 20).

In this paper, I will discuss my PhD major work, ‘I Know Such a Hidden Pool: an eco-memoir of Mulubinba Newcastle,’ which details my personal journey of developing a deeper relationship with local ecologies through the practice of citizen science. Along with the joy of learning how to identify species of plants and animals, I offer a view that is deeply ambivalent about the oppressive legacies of scientific language, and the capacity of scientific modes of writing to convey the lived experience of ecological threat and loss. As I question my own taxonomical urge to order and classify the chaos of life – both in the natural world and in my inner life – I reveal my process of leaning into ways of ‘not knowing’ about the world, and seeking comfort there, instead of in certainty. This paper will interweave creative and exegetical writing to reflect on the relationship between science and literature and show how environmental creative nonfiction can offer new ways of thinking about their interconnectedness.

Bio: Bastian Phelan is a writer of memoir and essays from Mulubinba Newcastle, Australia. Their debut memoir, How to Be Between, was published by Giramondo in 2022, and their essays have appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Island Magazine and The Guardian. Bastian is a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle, Australia.

Paper: “Tennessee Williams’ Escapology and the Heterotopia of ‘The Mysteries of the Joy Rio’”

Abstract: Tennessee Williams’ short stories “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” and “Hard Candy” (1954) concern a cinema whose darkened upper balconies have long been used for chance sexual encounters.  Employing Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, this article examines Williams’ derelict movie palace as a contestational social space and argues for a political project in Williams’ literary escapism.  By presenting heterotopia in fiction, Williams avoids the paradox of institutionalised alterity that clings to Foucault’s examples of real-world sites where norms are suspended.  The cinema’s heterotopian dimensions are real to the characters who experience them but not to the larger social forces that oversee institutionalisation in the storyworld, let alone in reality more broadly.  The characters’ heterotopian experiences, even as they are artefactually rendered and publicly communicated in the work of art, remain as fiction aloof from institutionalisation.  This is what an escapologist such as Williams can offer democracy – little disruptions that it cannot appropriate and that thus keep it open. 

Bio: James Phillips is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford UP, 2005), The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant (Stanford UP, 2007), Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle (Oxford UP, 2019) and Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros.: Ideology and Utopia in the Hollywood Musical (Bloomsbury, 2025) as well as the editor of Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema (Stanford UP, 2008) and co-editor, with John Severn, of Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres (Cham: Springer, 2021). His articles on literature have appeared in Angelaki, English Literary History, New Literary History, Philosophy and Literature and Textual Practice. 

Paper: Reading together, navigating change: Genre fiction and place-making in the Victorian Mallee
Co-authored by Bridget Magner.

Abstract: Shared reading practices are one literary means by which communities can make sense of their changing world, including pressing environmental and social transformations. This paper will consider the ways in which reading together specific place-related literatures enable reflections, conversations, and re-imaginings amongst several groups of regional readers in the Victorian Mallee. In particular, we argue that it is works of genre fiction that can generate these exchanges and creative processes, intersecting thematically, formally and narratively with the challenging conditions that climate crisis and related demographic, social and economic changes are bringing to Mallee communities. The paper will discuss the findings from book groups that focused on three different genre types – climate fiction, western fiction, and neuro-inclusive fiction – and engaged with both young adult and mature age readers.

Bio: Emily Potter is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. Her most recent book is Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field of Settler Colonial Place(Intellect/Uni Chicago). She has just completed the ARC-funded project ‘Reading in the Mallee: The Literary Past and Future of an Australian Region’ with Brigid Magner and Torika Bolatagici.

Paper: “It was the end of our life together”: Family Breakage and Repair in the Separation Stories of Aunty Ruth Hegarty
Co-authored by Kate Cantrell and Jessica Gildersleeve.

Abstract: Aunty Ruth Hegarty’s award-winning memoir, Is That You, Ruthie? (1999), is the author’s testimony of the extensive damage caused by the sanctioned removal and control of First Nations families under the Australian government’s policy of ‘protection’. Hegarty’s memoir, which can be read as a separation narrative, is an attempt to impose order and structure on the chaos and trauma that she endured as a child who was forcibly removed from family and Country, and interned in the dormitory system at Cherbourg mission. At the same time, Hegarty dismantles the colonial invention of native chaos and institutional order as she recounts, with characteristic humour, the ordinary, everyday ways that the dormitory girls engaged in counter-narratives of repair, resistance, and cultural renegotiation. Similarly, in Leah Purcell’s stage adaptation (2023) of the same name, Purcell combines storytelling with archival material to bridge the theatrical and historical worlds of the play and to invoke the audience’s obligation to bear witness. As a result, both Hegarty and Purcell remediate colonial ideas of chaos and order in a counter-discourse of memory and truth that questions what can and cannot be mended.

Bio: Nycole Prowse AFHEA teaches English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. She is a poet and playwright with 30 years’ experience in the creation and production of theatre and literary projects and festivals in Australia, Japan, China, the UK, and the Middle East. She is the author and editor of Intervening Spaces: Respatialisation and the Body (Brill 2018) and Heroin(e) Habits: Potential and Possibility in Female Drug Literature (Gylphi 2018).

Paper: Explosions and Affective Materiality in Ahmed Saʿdāwī ‘s Frankenstein in Baghdad

Abstract: Explosion of matter is a matter of affect. It targets the relation between the bodies and the world, impacting the capacity to affect and be affected. This paper reads Frankenstein in Baghdad in light of such relation between explosions and affect. The questions that such a turn to explosions in the novel poses are also at the level of the material and affective: what happens when the bombs constantly go off in your world? In the world you are reading about? What happens to the text, in the text and the style? Can the literary form ever capture and convey the chaos?

As suicide explosions punctuate the narrative and overwhelm the Iraqi population of post-US occupation Baghdad in the novel, doom—the ‘shock and awe’ of an “irrevocable destiny” (OED)—becomes the dominant affective mode of relation to the future and the prism through which everything else refracts. I argue that the operation of doom as an affect in the novel is linked to the deployment of necropower which “subjugates life to the power of death” and forces ‘certain’ bodies to occupy an in-between state between life and death. They, thus, generate an atmosphere in which doom as a collective affect is always already present and felt in the potential of an explosion, of corporeal pulverization, even if that potentiality is not individually materialized yet.

Bio: Mona Rahimpour is a PhD candidate in English and Theatre Studies at the university of Melbourne. Her research engages with a trend in contemporary global novel which she identifies under the new conceptual category of Doom Lit. Reading these works, she considers doom as an affect to examine the relationship between the fictional depictions of ontological and existential disruptions and the lived, material experiences of the present. Significantly, the plurality of ‘ends’ acknowledges diverse temporalities that prefigure human finality. In so doing, she attends to nuances of heterogeneous imaginaries of the Global South with fundamental, and often subversive, ontological differences to what ‘the end’ may look like. 
 

Paper: Deviance, criminality, and disability in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace

Abstract: This paper explores the representation of women’s deviance and criminality in Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel Alias Grace. Neo-Victorian portrayals of women’s deviance and criminality have been regularly observed through the lenses of sex, gender, race, class, and sexuality. However, disability is frequently overlooked, despite disability’s overwhelming significance to the pathologized classifications of these categories by the nineteenth-century criminological paradigm of the ‘born criminal’.  Furthermore, this pathologized process of classification positions disability as fundamental to the ways in which other marginalised groups have been positioned as ‘deviant’ or ‘criminal’.  This paper will interrogate the portrayal and treatment of the novel’s protagonist Grace Marks as both a disabled figure and criminalised subject. This reading will demonstrate how Atwood exposes disability — both actual disability, and the pathologization of other marginalised categories as disabled — as central to the execution of power and control, and the maintenance of social order by oppressive structures.

Bio: Chloe Riley (they/she) is a neuroqueer Australian writer and current doctoral candidate at the Australian National University. They hold an honours and a master’s degree in creative writing from Monash University, for which they received first class awards. Their short fiction has been published in Australia in Verge and in New Zealand in Aotearotica. Their creative writing and academic research explore issues of sexuality, gender, disability, and trauma, as well as historical fiction, postcolonial literature, and cultural memory. Their current doctoral research investigates the politicised representation of women’s deviance and criminality in neo-Victorian fiction.

Paper: A Chaotic Hamlet: Gertrude as Denmark’s Hereditary Queen

Abstract: My trigger for reading Hamlet through the lens of chaos and order was a quote from Germaine Greer, from Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction, p 65. ‘If we doubt [Hamlet’s] right to be “scourge and minister” to Denmark’s disease, the play collapses into chaos’. Greer sees chaos here as a problem. In theatre, I see chaos as, among other things, a worthwhile theme to explore.

In Hamlet this can be traced as a fundamental theme, in governance, dramaturgy and character.My investigation of the challenge of Gertrude’s character and role in Hamlet can be described as perceiving and creating both chaos and order. Acting might be thought of as finding an orderly character in the chaos of an actor’s own psyche. Hamlet’s Hereditary Queen, published last year, follows the journey of this investigation, which was surprisingly orderly. The premise was obvious, the evidence plentiful, and the precedents clear.

Bio: Kerrie Roberts has a background in teaching and theatre. Her play, Gertrude’s Hamlet and her scholarly book Hamlet’s Hereditary Queen, explore the arguments for and the consequences of reading Gertrude as carrying Denmark’s royal bloodline, not Hamlet’s father. Gertrude’s Hamlet was produced in 2011 at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre in Canberra. HHQ was published by Routledge in 2023. It is based on a thesis completed in 2021 at the University of Sydney, where she is now an Honorary Affiliate.

Paper: “The trouble with my copy, lad, is that it is all unprintable”: Kylie Tennant, the road, and the stories that became The Battlers

Abstract: “If you’d heard some of the conversations this evening it would have singed your eyebrows,” Kylie Tennant wrote to her husband, L. C Rodd, from Cootamundra, where she had been living rough among itinerant travellers during the Great Depression (Grant 45-6). The Battlers, published in 1941, is the result of Tennant’s desire to “think and feel” as the travellers did, and the extreme lengths to which she would go, in order to write accurately of a people largely overlooked. But despite being thought of as purely a “binocular naturalist objectively recording wild life in human form”, reporting documentary-style on the working class, it was fiction Tennant turned to for her tales of social realism in her quest for social justice (Tennant viii). This paper examines Tennant’s narrative choices used to fictionally frame the stories she collected from the road, and the literary order she created from the chaos of her experience. 

Bio: Stacey Roberts is a PhD candidate in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis examines the representation of working-class women in twentieth-century Australian women’s fiction.

Paper: ‘The Chaotic City from 9/11 to COVID-19’: A retrospective analysis of Andrew McGahan’s Underground (2006)

Abstract: Underground by Australian novelist Andrew McGahan was published in 2006 while Australia was contending with the psychological and global consequences of 9/11. It was a time when transnational interests fed into national concerns and where unsettling discourses resonated down to local levels of society. When read as a cultural artefact, what can a post-9/11 novel tell us about the dangers and potential threat of the metropolis in a post-COVID-19 world? After all, more cities were impacted during COVID-19 in 2020 than during 9/11 in 2001. How and why were urban trauma and fear of life in the city once again ignited? Utilising monster theory, trauma theory, as well as the work of Slavoj Žižek and Evan Calder Williams on the apocalypse, this paper explores how entropic evocations of the city during and after 9/11 were re-ignited during the recent COVID era, once again leading to social anxieties, trauma, and cultural unrest in Australia and beyond. 

Bio: Lydia Saleh Rofail is a researcher and educator working at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University. She completed her PhD in the English department at the University of Sydney in 2020. She has written extensively on traumatic configurations of the city in contemporary Australian fiction as well as the postcolonial Gothic in texts by Indian women. She is currently co-authoring a project on digital authorship in the YouTube influencer community. 

Panel: Discipline and Undiscipline in the Underworld
Appearing alongside Guy Davidson and Joseph Steinberg.

Paper: Feminisation, (Un)Discipline and the Brain of Andrea Long Chu

Abstract: My paper engages with figurations of mental (un)disciplinarity in relation to Andrea Long Chu’s short autofiction “China Brain,” which combines fiction, memoir and essay forms to narrate the experience of a woman undergoing “transcranial magnetic stimulation” (TMS) for severe depression. Six of the story’s twelve sections are narrated in the third person and describe a female patient—simply referred to as “she”—who initially chats with the TMS technician named Dennis as he “fires up the magnets” and “shoots seven pulses of electricity into her brain.” When Dennis discovers that “she” is a writer, he asks her if she will write about the TMS experience. “She” responds that she might write something “a little fictionalized, some first-person stuff” and that the “narrator” will be her “brain.” With reference to Chu’s essay “On Liking Women” (2018), and her provocation in Females (2019) that “[e]veryone is female, and everyone hates it,” I argue that feminisation is key to Chu’s “China Brain” as a story that tacitly addresses questions of literary disciplinarity primarily by considering where and how the narrating mind (“I”) is located in relation to the brain.

Bio: Monique Rooney teaches US literature and new media in the English Program, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, The Australian National University. The author of Living Screens: Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television (2015), she is currently writing her next book, which is titled Brow Network: Programs and Promises of Taste-Making in Contemporary American Art and Literature. She is also researching, and preparing to write the biography of, New Zealand-Australian author Ruth Park. 

Paper: “I Hope You Love it as Much as I Do”: The Chaos of Authorship in the Age of Digital Publishing.

Abstract: Digital and social media are rapidly changing how we consume and respond to fiction. In this paper, I propose that the notion of authorship within contemporary, genre fiction has been complicated by increasing reader interactivity, enabled by digital media. The rise of self-publication platforms (Wattpad, Amazon) and powerful marketing tools (BookTok, Goodreads) have brought authors and readers closer than ever. Social media has streamlined the interactivity of texts, an author is only a message away, and readers can publicly respond to, adapt, or ‘meme’ fiction, actively changing the transmedia landscape of the primary text. I pose that this interactivity blurs the lines between author and reader, imposing chaos on the concept of authorship. I elaborate this claim by analysing Anna Todd’s After, a fanfiction turned novel series. By exploring how authorship has changed hands throughout the text’s adaptation, I argue that the distinctions between author, reader, and text are rapidly blurring. 

Bio: Lucy Rouse is a third year PhD candidate and casual academic at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research explores how digital media is changing literary reception, with a focus on affect, interactivity, and community-based reading practices. Her PhD dissertation aims to investigate how literary-based social media, primarily BookTok and GoodReads, focalise pre-established reading communities. When not researching, Lucy tutors undergraduate English literature courses. Prior to commencing her PhD, Lucy completed a Bachelor of Arts (Deans Scholar) in English Literatures with Distinction and received first-class Honours for her thesis “Digitally Dating: How Video Gaming Queers Romance” both at UOW.

Paper: “The Wilde Waste Lands”: T.S. Eliot in Narnia

Abstract: Two works more different than T.S. Eliot’s 1922 modernist poem, The Waste Land and C.S. Lewis’s 1953 children’s story, The Silver Chair, are hard to imagine. Yet, for Lewis, the connection seemed important. Writing to a friend about his “new story,” in 1952, Lewis confesses that he wants to use “The Wilde Waste Lands” as his title, though his publisher thinks it “bad.” (Hooper n.p.) The reference to Eliot’s poem survives in the published Silver Chair in a chapter title (“The Wilde Waste Lands of the North”) and in textual allusions. (Lewis). Despite this sign of The Waste Land’s relevance to The Silver Chair, however, these intertextual connections have only been explored once. (Reinhard 20-25). This paper seeks to fill this gap. What is the significance of Lewis’s inclusion of the chaos of The Waste Land in a story for children? What is Eliot doing in Narnia? 

Bio: Hannah Frances Roux is a PhD candidate and Postgraduate Teaching Fellow in English at the University of Sydney. Her thesis investigates C.S. Lewis’s critical and fictional engagements with T.S. Eliot. 

Panel: Can the law provide order in an industry of chaos? Authors’ perception of authorship and ownership and the influence of AI
Appearing alongside Sarah Hook, Laura E. Goodin, and Feliticty Castagna.

Bio: Omar Sakr is a poet and writer born in Western Sydney to Lebanese and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the acclaimed author of a novel, Son of Sin (Affirm Press, 2022) and three poetry collections, notably The Lost Arabs (University of Queensland Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award. The Lost Arabs was also shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the John Bray Poetry Award, the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Literary Award, and the Colin Roderick Award; it was released in the US and worldwide through Andrews McMeel Universal. His newest collection, Non-Essential Work (UQP, 2023) is out now.

Paper:  Basantak: A Satirical Resistance to the New Order

Abstract: This communication recasts the relationship between satirical writings, illustrations, and the criticism of new order during the colonial times in India. I trace the manifestation of the political cartoons as a form of textual- pictorial representation as a critical voice in opposition to the contemporary socio-political construction inspired by the British. Basantak (1874-1875), India’s first vernacular satirical magazine, drew inspiration from ‘Punch’ magazine aesthetically, but the content of this magazine was different. 

It would be a serious study of visual culture that established a pictorial resistance to colonial mentality and modernity. It mainly targeted the Indian collaborators or the so-called middle-class Bengali intelligentsia. During colonial times, behavioral appearance and dressing sense were considered indicators of modernity. The educated middle-class Bengalis spontaneously embraced the practice of emulating British tradition to enhance their social and cultural standing. ‘Basantak’ did not criticize the values of modernity or the expansion of western education yet, it targeted those who accepted the culture and the fashion of modernity without understanding the base. Therefore, the question arises here: how those bold cartoons and writings make the resistance against the imperial raj? Furthermore, how far were those satirical writing and illustrations negotiated with the asymmetrical power relation? 

Bio: I am pursuing Ph.D. in History at the Department of History, Jadavpur University, India. My research titled ‘Visual Culture and Politics: Study of Bengal Politics through Political Cartoons, 1930-77, supervised by Professor Suchetana Chattopadhyaya locates the satirical tradition in Bengal within the changing political ethos of postcolonial India. I Completed my M.Phil. in History from Jadavpur University with a first class. I am a master’s in history from University of Hyderabad with a first class. My research interests include visual culture, the political ethos of Bengal and the semiotics of satirical cartoons. 

Paper: Agonism, Authority & AI

Abstract: Aeschylus’ final chapter in the Oresteia heralded the triumph of democratic order over Homeric chaos at moment where competing authorities struggled for power. By anointing the ‘democratic trial’ as the ultimate authority, the Ancient Greek notion of the agon was realised through rhetorical competition as the path to justice. Understanding justice – or dike – as an ordering, invites questions of how appealing to authority in legal spaces today can be disrupted by emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

Bio: Dr Jacinta Sassine is an Associate Lecturer in Law at Western Sydney University and admitted lawyer of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. She enjoys teaching and conducting interdisciplinary research across a range of areas, including legal philosophy and political theory. Her doctoral thesis argued for a deeper understanding of rhetorical justice within the practice of law in democratic systems, with a particular focus on Ancient Greek sophistry. Jacinta has been involved in several research projects, including with the Young and Resilient Research Centre, that has reflected her interest in justice and communication-based projects, particularly surrounding digital citizenship, algorithms, and emerging technologies. 

Paper: Australian non-nuclear families through the eyes of the child, in Tony Birch’s The White Girl (2019) and Women and Children (2023).

Abstract: Unlike many Australian contemporary narratives that interrogate motherhood – especially single motherhood – and typically focus on the mother’s perspective, Tony Birch’s novels The White Girl and Women and Children depict motherhood (and its inherent constraints) through the eyes of the child. Writers such as Helen Garner, Elizabeth Jolley, Amanda Lohrey, Kate Grenville, Melissa Lucashenko, and more, have considered the agency, equality, and sexual desire of mothers who operate outside of the normative nuclear family. Many of their novels focus on how the mother maintains her sense of self, against a moralistic and patriarchal defined social milieu.

Birch’s novels are interesting not only because they present a unique and contemporary take on Indigenous Australian non-nuclear families, but also because they shift the focus from the mothers’ to the child’s point of view, while still contemplating the agency and sense of self of the mother, against a hostile “outer” world. The central concerns of Birch’s novels are also shared between the generations, rather than being dominated by the mother’s. The limited perspective Birch employs is intimate, authentic and often disturbing in its frankness. Birch’s protagonists, 13-year-old Sissy in The White Girl, and 11-year-old Joe in Women and Children, tenaciously navigate their straightened living conditions in regional and inner-city colonialist Australia, respectively. Sissy, under the care of her grandmother, lives in a fictitious regional community in the 1950s and 60s impacted by the Stolen Generations, and Joe, lives in Collingwood Melbourne in the 1960s, and must circumvent the draconian influence of racist Catholic nuns and make sense of the domestic violence that has been inflicted on his aunt. Birch states that Women and Children is not “the story of my own family, but a story motivated by our family’s refusal to accept silence as an option in our lives”. The violence that shapes both novels comes from outside the family, and Birch signals how this violence erodes individuals within it, but also how the love and support provided by extended family members, is integral to negotiating an unfair, hostile “outer” world.”

Bio: Jane Scerri has published book reviews, journal articles, short stories and poetry (ASAL, AAWP, Global Media Journal and others). She is also working on her second novel and teaching at WSU.

Paper: Heimlich Unheimlich: war, migration, text-art collaboration, autofiction

Abstract: This paper explores the inter-generational effects of war, belonging, and migration. Its focus is Heimlich Unheimlich, a text-art collaboration by Hazel Smith (poet) and Sieglinde Karl-Spence (artist). The project takes several different forms: gallery installation, video and book (to be published in 2024 by Apothecary Archive). Heimlich Unheimlich stems from the contrasting childhoods of Sieglinde (German-Australian) and Hazel (British-Jewish), who both grew up in the chaotic aftermath of World War 11. A work of autofiction and a bildungsroman, its text-art collages include photographs from the authors’ family albums. The paper suggests that the overlapping meanings of ‘heimlich’ (secretive) and ‘unheimlich’ (uncanny), discussed in Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’, are heightened in the collaboration to problematise the idea of home. It also builds on ekphrastic and multimedia theory (Steiner, Mitchell, Brosch), and the genre of the artist’s book, to argue that an intermedia, collaborative approach can uniquely project ideas about cultural difference, the deferred impact of war and ethnic ambivalence. 

Bio: Emeritus Professor Hazel Smith is a poet, performer, new media artist and academic. She has authored several academic books including Hyperscapes in the poetry of Frank O’Hara, The Writing Experiment and The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship. She has published five poetry volumes including The Erotics of Geography, Word Migrants and Ecliptical. She has also published numerous performance and multimedia works and performed her work extensively internationally. She is a member of the multimedia ensemble austraLYSIS. In 2018, with Will Luers and Roger Dean, she was awarded first place in the Electronic Literature Organisation’s Robert Coover prize. In 2023 her collaboration with Luers and Dean, Dolphins in the Reservoir, was shortlisted for the UK New Media Writing prize. Her personal website is at http://www.australysis.com

Paper: James Joyce’s Radio Tower of Babel: Marconi, Clifden and the global wireless network in Finnegans Wake

Abstract: On 17 October 1907, near Clifden on the west coast of Ireland, the London-based Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company launched its transatlantic wireless telegraph service, communicating with its sister station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. It was a threshold moment in global telecommunications, and at the time Clifden was the world’s most powerful wireless station, run by the most powerful battery ever built. While the Marconi station transformed the local economy, within a few years the technology at Clifden had become obsolete, and in July 1922, during the Irish Civil War, the station was destroyed by
‘irregular’ republican forces who feared it would be used to communicate with British troops.

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) has long been recognised as a work profoundly engaged with the emerging age of electronic media, so it is no surprise that the Clifden Marconi station makes an appearance. This paper examines the deeply ambivalent treatment of global ‘radiospace’ in the Wake, which, even as its language celebrates the cacophonic Babel of ‘tuning in’ to broadcasts from around the world, is acutely attentive to the geopolitics of radio infrastructure, and the complex relations of this most evanescent of media with forces of nation, empire and global capital.

Bio: Dr Russell Smith is a lecturer in Modern Literature and Literary Theory at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has published widely on the work of Samuel Beckett, as well as on various topics in modernist literature, contemporary literature and visual art, and literary theory. His current project examines the impact of James Joyce’s 1930s radio listening on the composition of Finnegans Wake and its treatment of the emerging global wireless communications network.

Paper: Chaos and Order in the writing of David Malouf’s novel The Great World

Abstract: Authors who bring the chaos of war into their fiction must also create strategies that bring at least tentative order to the unsettling experiences they offer their readers. How does David Malouf approach the dynamic of chaos and order in composing his novel The Great World (published in 1990) which features his main characters’ experiences during World War Two? This paper will examine the evidence from Malouf’s literary archive that suggests how he shaped his work. In a key section of the novel, he makes acknowledged use of a diary kept by former Australian prisoner of war Stan Arneil. How does Malouf interpret Arneil’s sense of order for his own distinct purpose? In a broader sense, this paper investigates issues facing literary scholars who seek to understand a contemporary author’s way of working. Researchers must find their own ways of bringing useful order to the potential chaos of information they discover, particularly in the ever-expanding digital era. 

Bio: Yvonne Smith is an independent scholar who completed her doctorate at the University of Sydney. She has published articles in Australian Literary Studies, Southerly and the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Her book David Malouf and the Poetic: His Earlier Writing was published in 2017 in the Cambria Press Australian Literature Series, edited by Susan Lever. Her current research focuses on shifts in Australian literary culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She is writing a book on Malouf’s later works from 1985 to the present time.

Paper: That Men Should Fear: Subverting a Literary Social Order of City to Farms

Abstract: In a 1985 lecture published by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, Bruce Bennett states that the ‘world of farms … is commonly thought to be inhabited by slow wits’ (41). John Naish’s farm novel That Men Should Fear (1963) subverts a literary social order that Bennett describes as descending from metropolitan intelligence and sophistication to agrarian ignorance and artlessness. Recent articles have drawn attention to Naish, a formerly overlooked author, through readings on the georgic, ecocritical, and migrant experience. In this essay, I argue that Naish’s characterisation of the farmer as an educated medical doctor subverts the literary ‘scale of civilization’ noted by Bennett to a greater extent than other major writers of Australian farm novels. A comparative study of the agrarian protagonist in Jean Devanny’s Cindie: A Chronicle of the Canefields (1949) clarifies the literary order against which Naish wrote and marks his final work as the zenith of a progressive oeuvre. 

Bio: Elizabeth Smyth is a research associate at the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing, and book reviews editor for JASAL. Her research explores regionalism, ecocriticism, and representations of the wet tropics. She is published in Meanjin, JASAL, TEXT, and Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre. In 2023, she worked collaboratively on the ARC-funded National Newspaper Fiction Database. Her recent PhD thesis, completed at James Cook University, is titled Re-Imagining the Australian Farm Novel: Writing Magic Realism into the Georgic.

Panel: Discipline and Undiscipline in the Underworld
Appearing alongside Guy Davidson and Monique Rooney.

Paper: Alexis Wright’s Degrees

Abstract: What’s a doctorate good for? The answer, at least per Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book (2013), seems to be a career in personal security. Witness her punningly named trio of presidential bodyguards-cum-genies, who hold no less than ten PhDs between them. Forecasts of the humanities’ demise notwithstanding, Wright imagines a reality in which degrees in ostensibly industry-unfriendly subfields (hagiology? mystagogy? musicology?) have somehow landed jobs for their graduates beyond the tertiary system. Soon enough, we learn why they’re in demand: their employer is interested not in their expertise, but in their prestige’s general inscrutability, which allows him to pass off doctorates as doctors.

This punchline seems all the more sardonic if we consider the relation between such fictional degrees and the real Doctorate in Creative Arts that Wright commenced at WSU, fresh from her MA in Professional Writing and Editing at the RMIT, where she first began work on a manuscript that would eventually become The Swan Book. This paper does so, locating Wright’s prose within the institutional history of creative writing’s professionalisation as a tertiary discipline. Seen in this light, Wright’s work typifies an orientation of generative agnosticism toward the knowledge claims of other disciplines which characterises much tertiary creative practice, a mode of relation to other fields that is, in itself, classically novelistic.

Bio: Dr Joseph Steinberg is a Forrest Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Australia. His articles, reviews and interviews have appeared in Australian Literary Studies, JASAL, The Cambridge Quarterly, AHR, The Sydney Review of Books, and The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel. He is currently at work on two book projects: a literary history of the rise of creative writing as a subject in Australian universities, and a history of Australian literary prizes.

Paper: Old Chaos and New Order. The Significance of Religion in the Literary Friendship and Careers of Marcus Clarke and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Abstract: Marcus Clarke and Gerard Manley Hopkins, were in the 1850s and 60s ‘best friends. Young Clarke’ was a precocious boy of letters; ’Skin’ Hopkins a constant companion and fellow prankster, literary collaborator and loyal partner in misdemeanour. Cyril, Gerard’s younger brother, was the same age as Marcus, his ’special chum’ in an almost fraternal relationship that lasted until Marcus’s death. For Cyril, it persisted in memory into the twentieth century, via his links to Marcus’s children and widow.

‘Poor Clarke’s’ downward spiral to Victoria coincided with Gerard’s ascent to Oxford. This paper explores briefly, informed by some newly discovered material, the nature of Marcus’s supposed Christianity in Britain; and examines Clarke’s ideas concerning Gerald’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. The significance of Marcus’s unpublished (and lost) history of comparative religion, a treatise on the nature of all religion written later in Australia is explored from hints and references in Cyril’s and Marcus’s correspondence. Clarke’s flirtations with alternative conceptions of the Divine, including those of spiritualism, mysticism, occultism, Catholicism, and ‘scientific’ theories of the Enlightenment, of Paine, Comte and Darwin, are seen as efforts to establish ‘Order’ from the chaos of his own loss of faith. The need Clarke felt to become a public intellectual is contrasted with Gerard’s retreats into religious privacy and their theological significance.

Bio: Ken Stewart is a co-founder and Honorary Life Member of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. He has taught at the University of Tasmania and University of New England; and at Western Sydney University, where he became head of humanities at the campuses then known as Macarthur. He has published several books, and numerous essays and articles on Australian literature and culture. His most recent studies are of Marcus Clarke (including a co-edited edition of Cyril Hopkins’ manuscript biography), and of Emerson and Transcendentalism in nineteenth century Australia. He retired in 2003, and lives in Sydney.

Panel: Literature and Technology: ALS Convention Panel 2
Appearing alongside Helen Groth and Norma Lam-Saw.

Paper: Your AI Girlfriend Chatbot is Chaotic and Other Tales

Abstract: ‘Life online is losing chaos, unpredictability, and delight’ reads the by-line of a recent article in The Atlantic about the end of the so-called Internet Era. Such claims often nostalgically invoke the internet of the 2010s as a period of cultural and social vibrancy where the online world was still human, in way that today it manifestly is not. What happened when the internet became less chaotic, less familiar, drier, and lost its humanity? How is it that the order imposed by the algorithmic turn feels both out of control and yet oppressive at the same time? This paper considers how these, and related questions, are imaginatively played out and critiqued in a range of contemporary literary fiction about life online. Reading across three recent novels—Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021), R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface (2023) and Yomi Adegoke’s The List (2023)—it theorises a moment of paradoxical algorithmic chaos to consider the role of literature in addressing pressing live debates about AI, digital intimacy, dataveillance and human subjectivity in the post-Internet age. 

Bio: Tyne Daile Sumner is an ARC DECRA Fellow in English & Digital Humanities at The Australian National University. She works at the intersection of surveillance studies, digital culture and literary studies, with a focus on how literary texts help us think about human subjectivity under conditions of datafication. She has published widely on topics ranging from modern poetry and eavesdropping to cultural databases and facial recognition technology. Her most recent book is Small Data is Beautiful (co-edited, Grattan Street Press 2023) and she is President of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH).

Panel: The story of John Hughes’ plagiarism.
Appearing alongside Lachlan Brown, Richard Cooke, Sam Lieblich, and Anna Verney.

Bio: Emmett Stinson completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne. He has previously held positions as a Lecturer in Publishing at the University of Melbourne, a Senior Lecturer in English and Writing at University of Newcastle, and a Senior Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. He is a literary scholar, a creative writer, and an expert on the global publishing industry. He was a member of Senator Kim Carr’s federal Book Industry Strategy Group. He co-founded and was President of the Small Press Network — the Australian advocacy body for independent publishers, which is housed in the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing, and Ideas. He co-founded the Independent Publishing Conference and established a series on publishing at Monash University Publishing. He won the Melbourne Age Short Story Award, and his book of short stories, Known Unknowns, was shortlisted for the Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. He was a CI on the ARC Discovery Project, ‘New Tastemakers and Australia’s Post-Digital Literary Culture’. His most recent monograph is about the late novels of Gerald Murnane (Melbourne University Press, 2023).

Paper: Please Hold For Life: Andrew McGahan’s Praise and the Welfare Bildungsroman

Abstract: The Bildungsroman casts coming-of-age as individual integration with the social. According to dominant theories, the genre rises with capitalism and aims to synthesise the instability of that economic mode and the protean formlessness of youth into orderly and harmonious maturity. This would exclude texts whose protagonists belong to classes or groups in which (or historical moments at which) choosing integration is impossible. Theories that respond by making the genre about the crises of social integration, however, do not account for how we, usually, go on living. This paper surveys these contradictions and accounts for how promises work in the genre before reading Andrew McGahan’s Praise (1992). McGahan’s welfare-recipient Bildungsheld’s refusal of social integration is a coming-of-age, and this reading provides a starting point to ask how readers and societies use the Bildungsroman, to what extent it relies on bringing about personal and social order.  

Bio: Alex Sutcliffe recently academically qualified for an MPhil in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. Alex, like all Adelaideans, lives in Melbourne’s inner north. 

Paper: Fictions of Control or, How Chaos Undercuts Order in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder

Abstract: Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder features an unnamed narrator who has been traumatised by an accident. He receives eight and a half million pounds in compensatory settlement but is estranged from the people surrounding him as he feels that he cannot have “authentic” experiences anymore. He spends his days attempting to recreate half-remembered experiences that predate the accident. These attempts, however, are unsuccessful as he cannot undo the impact of the accident. Unsurprisingly, he begins to recreate bizarre and risky incidents that include even bank heists and drive-by shootings.
The proposed paper would argue that the failure of McCarthy’s narrator to recover from the trauma of the accident implies that chaos and disorder necessarily underlie what he perceives to be order and logic as the principles governing his life. Additionally, it will suggest that Remainder not only narratives the “fiction” that the narrator’s attempts at control turn out to be but also provides glimpses of the ethico-political possibilities offered by chaos interrupting order—as exemplified by the repeated recreations carried out in the novel.

Bio: Chinmaya Lal Thakur is an Assistant Professor of English at Shiv Nadar University (Institution of Eminence) in Delhi/NCR, India. He has recently completed his doctoral research on subjectivity in the novels of David Malouf at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He has published widely in the areas of postcolonial literatures and cultures, the contemporary novel, Continental philosophy, modernist literatures, and narrative theory. His forthcoming publications include a chapter on the politics of transnationalism in Aleksandar Hemon’s 2008 novel The Lazarus Project and a short monograph on the life and works of Peter Carey.

Paper: A metaphorical approach to reading

Abstract: My paper responds to some of the lively debates currently taking place around method in literary studies, by proposing s a metaphorical approach to reading that offers new ways of understanding literary experience and interpretation. I shows how a certain set of metaphors relating to depth and distance have dominated literary studies for many decades, and offer alternative ways of understanding what it means to engage with fiction. Taking up Rita Felski’s recent call to experiment with styles of reading that might take us beyond the problems associated with critique, the paper shows how we can reimagine aesthetic experience and literary interpretation by experimenting with the interpretive metaphors that guide our responses to texts. It does so by exploring three particularly fertile metaphors that take us well beyond the conventional postures of critique: reading as method acting, as overhearing, and as perfectionist pursuit. In laying out these metaphors alongside brief examples from contemporary novels, I reveal how they offer important new insights on affect studies, aesthetics, the ethics of reading, reception studies, and philosophical approaches to literature.

Bio: Lucas Thompson is a Lecturer in the Department of English & Writing at the University of Sydney, Australia. His research is situated at the intersection of literature and philosophy, with a particularly focus on twentieth- and twenty-first century Anglophone fiction. He is the author of Metaphors We Read By (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017). He has also published numerous articles on twentieth-century and contemporary fiction—in such journals as New Literary History, Comparative Literature, Journal of American Studies, and Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies —as well as several book chapters in edited collections.

Panel: Disability
Appearing alongside Kit Kavanagh-Ryan and Jessica White.

Paper: There was a problem processing your order: Interpreting Les Murray’s first autism poem

Abstract: In 1974 Murray published his first poem on autism, “Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver.” To him it was a scrupulously honest and vulnerable portrait of himself and the autistic people that he knew. He wrote of autistic joy, autistic kinship, and autistic talents, all in language that embodied the vividness of autistic experience. He also discussed the effort required to interact with nonautistic people, the possibility that autistic intense interests can have dangerous consequences, and his insistence on maintaining relationships with both groups

How was it, then, that Murray’s intention to communicate so much was interpreted as a lack of interest in communicating? And why was Murray’s meticulous attention to the order of words dismissed as a focus on noise? Through a close reading of Murray’s “Portrait” this paper explores the processing and communication differences between autistic and nonautistic people which answer these and related questions.”

Bio: Amanda Tink is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UniSA Creative, University of South Australia, on the project “Finding Australia’s Disabled Authors: Connection, Creativity, Community.” She is also Adjunct Research Fellow at Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre, after completing her PhD there in 2023. Her thesis “Never Towing a Line: Les Murray, Autism, and Australian Literature” details how Murray’s autism and his experiences of being disabled influenced his poetry. In 2022, with Dr Jessica White, she co-edited a special issue of Australian Literary Studies titled Writing Disability in Australia.

Paper: Order and Chaos: Complexity in Chess and Literature

Abstract: Chess is a game of order and chaos. From predictable openings through novel lines and endgames, there are more possible chess games than atoms in the universe. Yet, certainty exists in the initial arrangement of pieces and solvability of endgames. It is in finite exchanges and the chaos of each middlegame that creativity brings to bear on logic, yielding complex outcomes. Often in the uncertainty of each formation, choice and focus decide which endgame is created from the chaos of unknown positions. For, although openings can be studied, and endgames calculated, it is in the present moment that the effect of each choice and its consequent ripples determine the meaning and tractability of the final outcome. In some ways, this process is similar to that found in writing, and even the ideological and existential challenges facing us today: Which moves are natural? Which lines contain the greatest likelihood of success?

Bio: Michelle is a graduate of Western Sydney University’s literature and creative writing program. She finds the role of creativity in literature and chess to be an exciting one. Michelle also has an interest in mathematics and computation along with game theory and its applications. In her spare time, she is an amateur chess player.

Paper: Creation and chaos: from technics to literary techniques

Abstract: In this paper, I will outline the function of invention in Gilbert Simondon’s works on individuation and technology, using these insights to reflect on the tension between creative and productive functions in literary techniques. For Simondon, invention is not a creative force ex nihilo, but a recursion of informed thought upon a technical ensemble undergoing its own evolutionary becoming. In this paper I will outline how this account of creativity hews closer to a dialectic between chaos and order, than a sovereign creative impulse mediated by contingency. I will conclude with some remarks about how this approach might be of use for intertextual, metafictional and postcolonial analyses of literary texts.

Bio: Jason Tuckwell is an Associate Lecturer in English at Western Sydney University. His research interests include Aristotle, Simondon, aesthetics and technology, with a particular focus upon problems of creative and technical praxes.

Panel: Spinoza and Disposition
Appearing alongside Moira Gatens.

Bio: Anthony Uhlmann is Distinguished Professor of English and Interim Dean of the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. He is the author of four academic monographs and a novel. He is a director of the recently founded Vitagraph Publishing which publishes the new literary journal Written Off. He is currently completing a  new book with Moira Gatens on Spinoza and Literature.

Paper: Physical Vulnerability, Disability, And Narrative Repair in Australian Acquired Brain Injury Memoirs

Abstract: Unlocking My Brain: Through the Labyrinth of Acquired Brain Injury (2014), by Christine Bryden (a.k.a. Dr. Christine Durham) and My Lucky Stroke (2020), written by Sarah Brooker, both recount personal tragedies and how the lives of these women changed overnight following a traumatic brain injury caused by a brutal car-driving accident. Their nonfiction writings, which go under the restrictive label of “acquired brain injury memoirs”, reveal how their subjects are coping with acquired disability and how their personalities and well-being are getting affected by it. Therefore, I will analyse the acquired brain injury memoir genre and its reparative possibilities which enable these writers’s plastic brains to transition from chaos to order, from trauma to resilience, and from stigma to social acceptance. The thorough investigation of this emerging life writing genre of a special kind will show how writing can offer healing possibilities to the vulnerable body and how it can fuel the much-hope-for recovery by remaining in control of one’s life narrative.

Bio: Jean-François Vernay is the author of five monographs among which The Seduction of Fiction: A Plea for Putting Emotions Back into Literary Interpretation (Palgrave, 2016), currently translated into Mandarin, La séduction de la fiction (Hermann, 2019), and Neurocognitive Interpretations of Austral-ian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness (Routledge, 2021). He has also edited a Routledge volume: The Rise of the Australian Neurohumanities: Conversations Between Neurocognitive Research and Australian Literature, published in 2021. His monographs have been taken up for translation into English, Arabic, Korean, and Mandarin. He is currently working with Professor Don-ald Wehrs and Dr. Isabelle Wentworth on a new project focused on the productivity of negative emotions.

Panel: The story of John Hughes’ plagiarism.
Appearing alongside Lachlan Brown, Richard Cooke, Sam Lieblich, and Emmett Stinson.

Bio: Anna Verney is a journalist and writer. In 2023, she won the Walkley Award for Long Feature Writing and the Walkley Foundation’s June Andrews Award for Arts Journalism. She is completing her Masters dissertation in Creative Writing at The University of Sydney, where she was the recipient of the Janet O’Connor Scholarship in writing. She is also a legal policy reformer and former practising lawyer, specialising in children’s rights and the rights of victim-survivors of sexual assault. She holds a Masters of International Law (Human Rights) from Georgetown University, Washington DC, and a double First in Arts (Political Science) and Law from the Australian National University, where she was a National Undergraduate Scholar.

Paper: Tangles or Wonderland: Re-envisaging the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Graphic Memoirs of Dementia

Abstract: This paper analyses how two graphic memoirs, Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother, and Me (2012) and Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s through the Looking Glass (2013) portray mother-daughter relationships that are transformed through Alzheimer’s. It considers how these graphic memoirs tackle the feminisation of care and challenges of reciprocity when generational roles change. It also examines how they reproduce dominant tropes while generating a contextualised understanding of ambiguous loss and complex feelings. The paper then discusses the significance of dementia graphic memoir as a subgenre to build new intimate publics and to test narrative limits, particularly in their movement towards the “digressive, episodic and tonally uneven” (Fraiman, 992). Lastly, I am interested in how these graphic memoirs represent issues of maintenance and questions of self-care but not, significantly, the socio-economic underpinnings that enable them. 

Bio: Ann Vickery is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry (Cambridge University Press, in press) and co-editor of the forthcoming The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry. She is author of Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing and Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry, and co-author of The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers. She is also the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack.

Paper: (Re)viewing Reviews

Abstract: Within the scope of literary studies, book reviews have traditionally been defined as pieces of sustained criticism about a specific text or texts. This conceptualisation is tied to the rise of nineteenth-century literary journals, notably the Edinburgh Review. Yet this long-held definition of review-as-literary-criticism does not capture the vast, multifaceted landscape of reviewing nor how that landscape has changed over time. This paper uses a study of twentieth-century Australian print culture to outline how a historicised, quantitative approach reveals multiple forms of book reviews. Different review forms have different styles, structures, histories and, importantly, purposes. Some are short, descriptive paragraphs more akin to advertising – arising from seventeenth-century traditions – as distinct from the expected long-form articles. Capturing all forms via a new typology of book reviews – without imposing artificial hierarchies or strict boundaries – expands scholarly understandings of reviewing, including how reviewing is situated within broader literary cultures.

Bio: Rebekah Ward has recently completed her PhD in book history at Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on the history of print culture, blending traditional archival research with digital humanities approaches. Her doctorate explored how Angus & Robertson (the largest Australian publishing house) solicited book reviews from around the world on a mass scale in order to promote their publications.

Panel: Colonial Adventures
Appearing alongside Ken Gelder.

Paper: Colonial Convict and Transportation Adventures.
Co-authored by Ken Gelder.

Abstract: This paper looks at convict and transportation adventures. Convicts were an unpaid labour force, coerced and conscripted by law into the raw business of colonisation, building roads, clearing forests, planting crops etc. But convicts also almost immediately absconded, in many cases leaving the colonies to get as far away as they possibly could. We look at the earliest examples of absconding convicts; for many, China was both a real and an imaginary destination. The greatest convict escape, in March 1791, involved the theft of a six-oar boat, with the convict crew (with infants on board) rowing all the way from Warrane/Sydney Cove to West Timor. Convicts even took command of large ships. A first-hand account of ‘convict piracy’ is given in the memoirs of James Porter, one of a number of convicts who, in January 1834, seized the Frederick, a brig that had been left at Parralaongatek/Macquarie Harbour, on the west coast of lutruwita/Tasmania, when the penal settlement there was being closed down; they sailed to Chile.

We then look at three colonial convict novels, beginning with Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton (1830) as a point of contrast – since it is not a colonial adventure. (As E. Morris Miller once remarked, Savery ‘failed to let himself go in full blast’.) A discussion of James Tucker’s Ralph Rashleigh (c. 1845) will look at historical contexts for the novel and argue that it is an example of what we call the ‘Sadean picaresque’. Among other things, we focus on Rashleigh’s four-year ‘interlude’ with Aboriginal people somewhere along the northern Queensland coast: a remarkable (and peaceful) moment in a colonial novel that otherwise relentlessly torments and punishes its protagonist. We then look at Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1870-72), which returns to Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s and draws on Porter’s memoirs as John Rex and other convicts steal the Osprey – and sail to China. As with Quintus Servinton and Ralph Rashleigh, we note connections to slavers and slavery, and to profiteering in the sugar industry. But we also note that Clarke’s novel, especially in its Parralaongatek/Macquarie Harbour scenes, makes no mention of Aboriginal (palawa) people, effectively erasing them from its narrative. We end the paper by accounting for Clarke’s novel as a ‘Sadean melodrama’ that – much like Ralph Rashleigh – refuses to allow its protagonist to participate in any kind of colonial future.

Bio: Rachael Weaver is an ARC Future Fellow in English at the University of Tasmania and a 2024 Visiting Scholar at the State Library of New South Wales. She is the author of The Criminal of the Century (2006) and, with Ken Gelder, The Colonial Journals, and the emergence of Australian literary culture (2014), Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy (2017), The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt (2020), and Colonial Adventure (forthcoming, 2024).

Paper: “To Cultivate Our Own”: Ordering the Colony in the Children’s Literature of Louisa Anne Meredith
Co-authored by Sara Fernandes.

Abstract: This paper analyses Louisa Anne Meredith’s use of scientific classification in her books produced for colonial child-readers in nineteenth-century Tasmania, with a particular focus on Some of My Bush Friends in Tasmania (1860), Loved and Lost (1869), and Tasmanian Friends and Foes; Furred, Feathered, and Finned (1880). We argue that Meredith imports the British-colonial apparatus of taxonomy, scientific vocabulary, and botanical illustration to order and make legible a landscape that she perceived as being at once wild and ripe for cultivation. Building on John Plotz’s theorisation of ‘portability’, wherein nineteenth-century Britons collectively invested in a ‘national portable property’ in efforts to ‘stay English’ in ‘Greater Britain’ (2), this paper reads the status of the colonial child in Meredith’s works as the idealised mini-colonialist whose knowledge of the landscape is developed through textual encounter. Such reading habits inculcated, from the earliest stages of development, the understanding that their unruly colonial island might first be brought under the disciplining hand of scientific order on the page, before being cultivated in practice. 

Bio: Lauren Weber is a lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Wollongong. Her work is focused on the teaching and learning of English as a subject. She has published her research and writing in English in Education, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and Cordite Poetry Review.

Panel: Disability
Appearing alongside Kit Kavanagh-Ryan and Amanda Tink.

Paper: Creating Chaos in a Wheelchair: Dorothy Cottrell, Writing and Disability

Abstract: Dorothy Cottrell, who contracted polio when she was 5 and spent the majority of her life in a wheelchair, was not one to obey orders. After finishing art school in her late teens, she moved to the family property at Ularunda in Queensland and fell in love with her uncle’s bookkeeper. Defying her family, she and Walter eloped. Dorothy published her first novel, The Singing Gold, in 1928, and made so much income from her books and film rights that she received an enormous tax bill. Rather than paying it, she and Walter escaped to the US, where Dorothy kept them afloat with her writing during the Depression. Later, she and Walter sailed around the Caribbean in a yacht. This paper illustrates how Dorothy Cottrell disputed that assumption people are confined by their disability. It shows how, with accommodations such as her wheelchair, Cottrell translated new experiences and sensations into vivid, fast-paced writing.

Bio: Dr Jessica White is the author of the novels A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement, and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud, which won the 2020 Michael Crouch Award for a debut work of biography and was shortlisted for four national awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Jessica has received funding from the Australia Research Council, the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland and Arts South Australia. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of South Australia where, together with Dr Amanda Tink, she is working on the ARC Discovery Project ‘Finding Australia’s Disabled Authors: Connection, Creativity, Community.’

Paper: The pursuit of order through pessimism in Weird fiction

Abstract: Weird fiction, literature that “invoke[s] in the reader a sense of uncanny fear and […] call[s] into question the very nature of reality”  is closely associated with the traditions of philosophical pessimism. An opportunity exists to investigate how Weird fiction’s representation of pessimist thought demonstrates a yearning for solutions to the perceived chaos of existence itself, as “we have been trained so well to accept the ‘order’ of an unreal world that we do not rebel against it”. This paper will read select pessimistic Weird short stories of American author Thomas Ligotti as representations of life and nature as negative chaos mistakenly perceived as order, and the negation of life as its desirable orderly opposite. Through the framework of the pessimistic antinatalist philosophy of David Benatar, this reading will situate pessimistic literature amid broader literary attempts to impose systems of order as a peculiar kind which advocates order through annihilation and extinction.

Bio: Alastair Whyte is an independent scholar from Sydney, Australia with a PhD in English Literature from the University of Sydney. He is an editor for AULLA’s Journal of Language, Literature and Culture. His areas of expertise are utopian literature, Weird fiction and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Paper: Weird Monsters in Octavie E. Butler’s “Bloodchild”: A New Weird Movement

Abstract: Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild” contributes to a Weird Fiction movement that disrupts instantiating phallocentric order to produce a New Weird. As a contemporary reorientation that departs from the Old Weird and its characteristics, the New generates concern for critical scholars who view it as a negative effect for Weird Fiction. Locating Weird monsters is a key aspect in understanding a New Weird. My interest in this paper is locating monsters of the Weird in Butler’s “Bloodchild” as a chaotic disruption of this literary tradition. The prominent theme of mothers—a crucial point for the feminist criticisms that discuss Butler’s focus on male impregnation and childbirth—provides a framework for exploring the fetishised phallic mother and her disturbing gaze. Bulter’s short story provides a connection via the unknowable and (im)possible position of Weird monsters, which are capable of crossing and troubling the boundaries of genre with an all-seeing and (im)possible object-gaze.

Bio: Dr Anne-Maree Wicks is a PhD (English Literature) graduate from the University of Southern Queensland. Building on her thesis research, publications include a chapter in The American Weird; Concept and Medium (Bloomsbury, 2021) and H. P. Lovecraft’s Weird Tale Ideal: Angela Carter’s New Weird Dystopia (Colloquy, 2018). Her current endeavours include a collaboration project with Professor Laurie Johnson on tracing Weird Fiction alongside Shakespearean literary traditions.

Paper: Living a queer death: Queer mentorship and the art of failure in The Song of Achilles (2011) and Hades (2020)
Co-authored by Heather Blakey.

Abstract: The Song of Achilles and Hades are both fictional revisions that draw from Greek myths to expand upon the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. We interpret queerness in these texts as chaotic and consider how the choices Achilles and Patroclus make in relation to their queerness can be read as acts of failure. We approach failure as a chaotic means of exploring ‘absurdities and abjections’ and as an ‘art of being differently’ (Ruberg 203) in the existing social order. We argue that to reach a queer ‘other world’ Achilles and Patroclus must first fail as the version of themselves that existed under certain social status quos. We consider the ways in which the form of each text (novel and video game) allow for different explorations of queerness and conclude that both texts celebrate chaos and failure as queer forces which allow for the creation of new forms of living.

Bio: Fiona Wilkes is a current PhD Candidate at The University of Western Australia specialising in English & Literary Studies, with a focus on mythological retellings and reception studies. Her creative works have been published across a variety of national and international publications. She was a featured writer at the 2022 National Young Writers Festival. She was shortlisted for the 2023 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction and was Highly Commended for the 2023 Katharine Susannah Pritchard Short Fiction Prize. 

Paper: Decapitating the Dead: Dis-order in Keats’s Representation of Isabella

Abstract: John Keats’s poem ‘Isabella; or The Pot of Basil’ (1820) has been customarily read in terms of capitalism or the grotesque, but it is also a bizarre representation of female autonomy in the heroine’s decapitation of her dead lover’s corpse. In his adaptation of a tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), Keats makes changes that in many ways challenge established early nineteenth-century conceptions of gender. In doing so, Keats emphasises forms of dis-order, from the dismemberment of a body, through the disruption of natural and social orders to the disruption of narrative and poetic orders. This paper will undertake a close comparison between Keats’s poem and Boccaccio’s original tale. Through the study of these forms of disorder, this paper aims to understand the significance of narrative poetry in the representation of women in British Romanticism. 

Bio: Susan Xia is a second-year PhD student at UNSW studying the representation of women in Keats’s narrative poetry. Her thesis seeks to understand how, and to what extent, Keats’s thinking about women and the feminine has influenced his representation of women; how Keats’s female characters are portrayed in relation to conceptions of gender in the early nineteenth-century and feminism in the Romantic literary marketplace; and how Keats’s representation of women can in turn inform our understanding of his thinking about women and femininity.