Articles
Post-Carnivalism in David Ireland's The Unknown Industrial Prisoner
This paper develops the notion of the Bakhtinian carnival and it's relation
to Nietzsche's
man of ressentiment. Reading Ireland's novel in the context of Australian
history, it concludes
that the "cultural cringe" may be a good thing and may, in fact, never
have gone far enough.
The Magic Pudding and Symposiastic Law
Norman Lindsay's classic Australian novel for children belongs to the genre
of symposiastic
menippean satire. As with most popular children's classics, The Magic Pudding
is ultimately concerned
with very adult themes, in this case, the law, how it is constituted and how
it relates to ideas of 'Australia'
The Abstract Grotesque in Beckett's Trilogy
This paper was given at the Sydney Beckett Symposium in January 2003 and is published in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui 14. Give it a go - there's more where that came from!
Black Bile and Man's Best Friend: A History of the Black Dog
This essay was published as part of a writing competition to promote awareness of depression.
Everyone knows about Ern Malley, the hoax poet supposedly concocted in one afternoon in 1943 by Harold Stewart and James McAuley. And just about everyone has written about the hoax - but hardly ever about the poems themselves. This article was co-written with Peter Kirkpatrick, poet, academic and all-round good bloke, and tries to give a reading of The Darkening Ecliptic as poetry rather than mere socio-cultural phenomenon.