Review of *Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene* by Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell

The Nubians, the largest ethnic community in Egypt, saw their ancestral homelands disappear beneath the waters of the Nile from the dawn of the 20th century through to 1964. The massive displacement of this population has been the subject of numerous literary works by Nubian writers who seek to save their heritage from oblivion and to preserve their Nubian collective memory. Despite the renewal of socio-political interest in Nubia in post-2011 Egypt, the authors of Voices from Nubia, all non-Nubian Egyptians, claim that art in general and literature in particular remain the domain in which the problematics of what has been called the Nubian Question can be primarily vocalized. Only through a thorough reading and analysis of the literary output of Egyptian Nubians can the complexities of Nubia, its people, and culture can find full expression. The rich literary heritage of contemporary Nubian literature allows for a multiplicity of critiques that makes possible a reading of this literature that crosses the borderlines between literature, history, geography, politics, gender, and ethnicity. The diversity of themes and tropes in Voices from Nubia reflects a hallmark of Nubian literary output which is generally marked by a common feeling of solidarity around the Nubian cause. The array of critical studies included in the volume’s eight chapters covers a multiplicity of approaches: cultural, postcolonial, ecofeminist, and critical race theory. Voices from Nubia constitutes an attempt to go beyond the dichotomy between the activist Nubian writer who views the Nubian Question as a human rights issue and Arab-Egyptian nationalists who consider the discussion of Nubians as a distinct ethnic group or minority a threat to societal cohesion and national security. The editors conclude the book with interviews with three Egyptian Nubian writers belonging to different generations and expressing different positions with regards to the Nubian Question. It is thus hoped that this book will introduce the English-speaking reader to the rich tradition of contemporary Nubian literature from Egypt, written in Arabic. On the other hand, the book also forces the Egyptian-Arab reader to question some of the most cherished assumptions and ingrained ideas about the nature of culture, history, and identity. As such, Voices from Nubia has far-reaching implications for how we think about the diverse nature of our societies and nations.

Southern African Literature on the Global Literary MarketSeveral scholars in recent years have brought postcolonial and transcultural literary study into contact with developments in world literary studies and book history. The result has been analyses of how the commercialization of cultures, the globalization of the publishing world, and the position of postcolonial and transcultural studies as academic fields affect or should affect literary study.1 This article looks at the exchange from the point of view of Southern African literature. I trace some of the central issues by comparing two readings of contemporary black South African literature before relating them to arguments made by Graham Huggan and Sarah Brouillette on the relationship between commercial global publishing and postcolonial (or transcultural) literary study. By way of contribution to the exchange - and as a means to test some of its assumptions - I then employ a book-historical approach to discuss some aspects of the marketing and reception of Yvonne Vera, arguably Zimbabwe's greatest writer in the last decade, on the US literary market.In his book on transculturation in South African literary culture, David Attwell devotes the last chapter to a discussion of the experimental, and partly post-apartheid, writing of Njabulo Ndebele and Zakes Mda. He contextualizes his argument in terms of a South African cultural debate on literary experimentalism (by which he means a self-reflexive literature often associated with European modernism) in which it has been taken for granted that experimental prose is foreign to black South African literature and that it undercuts the social value of literature at any rate. Attwell challenges both these views. Ndebele and Mda are distinctly experimental writers, he states, and can be placed in a long but neglected line of black literary experimenters. Their style is of a particularly South African blend, which does not mean that they are not in touch with European or 'Western' developments. On the contrary, they draw on various foreign and indigenous sources, moulding them into something capable of both reflection on and response to South African conditions:What we find in Ndebele and Mda is indeed an attempt to develop a transformative fictional practice answering to the specific situation of black South African subjectivity under the conditions of modernity defined by the apartheid city.2The conclusion in the chapter on contemporary literature is in line with the overall project of his book. Rewriting Modernity, Attwell explains, is a study of the ways black authors have sought to establish [...] themselves as modern subjects, in direct opposition to the identities ascribed to them in colonial and apartheid ideology through writing.3Attwell's readings are exemplary in their sophistication and evocation of specific historical contexts, but his attention to transcultural flows is also ultimately national in scope. He claims that, just like the earlier authors discussed in the foregoing chapters of his book, Ndebele and Mda address address specifically South African conditions, and their texts assert and refashion black subjectivity in and against a South Africa dominated by whites. Whereas the author and the literary text express a transcultural confluence of themes and formal elements, literary value (which Attwell defines partly in cultural political terms) is tied to its potential role for the nation. This delimitation of space is not without significance, nor is his assumption that authors respond to nationally defined conditions. His focus, to be sure, is literary and not sociological; it centres on texts rather than audiences and actual reading practices. Nevertheless, the value of the literature under discussion depends upon his somewhat under-articulated assumption that the texts find, and are able to affect, their readers. While these readers need not necessarily be South African by birth or residence, Attwell undoubtedly implies a connection between them. …

This qualitative research data looks at book clubs. Focus groups were used to find out to what extent literature enhances reconciliation, if at all and whether reading makes a difference. Focus groups were held in 2012 in Brisbane, Townsville, Hobart and Launceston. This project is being conducted jointly with Dr Robert Clarke, University of Tasmania. The data is still being analysed. Internal Australian Catholic University funding has been provided for the project. This is a pilot for a larger project. The data consists of Word transcripts and digital recordings stored on DVD and hard drives. There is also an “Information for Participants file”, an “interview Protocol” and a Survey form.

Putting Class Back in the Picture Louisa Hadley (bio) Lawrence Driscoll , Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature. New York and Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 243 pp. $90.00. Ever since Margaret Thatcher's notorious declaration in 1987 that "there is no such thing as society," the language of class has been increasingly removed from the discourses of the state and the media in Britain. 1 Indeed, under Tony Blair, class politics were supposedly entirely replaced by lifestyle politics. In his provocative study Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature, Lawrence Driscoll examines "the extent to which, since 1979, collective concerns and the issues of class and society, have been ideologically transformed into poststructuralist abstractions of 'identity' and the fulfillment of 'personal desire'" (170). Reading against the grain of postmodern and poststructuralist theory, however, Driscoll excavates the concern with class that he claims remains as "a troubling subterranean and repressed element in contemporary literature, theory, and culture" (1). This list more accurately captures the range of Driscoll's book than its title; complementing his analysis of contemporary literature, Driscoll incorporates a chapter that considers how class is inscribed in contemporary film and television. This chapter, the most engaging in the book, brings a unique interdisciplinary approach to Driscoll's analysis of the [End Page 384] position of class in contemporary British literature and culture. In discussing contemporary fiction, Driscoll focuses on the key texts of eleven major contemporary writers: Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Will Self, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Hanif Kureishi, Alan Hollinghurst, Graham Swift, and Jonathan Coe. Through his analysis, Driscoll challenges the now-standard critical responses to these authors and successfully demonstrates the need to put class back into the picture in discussions of contemporary British fiction and culture. Although Driscoll's study focuses on the depiction of class in literary and visual texts, he is equally concerned with the ways in which critical theory, particularly postmodernism, seeks to erase class. This analysis of the critical accounts of contemporary fiction provides an important corrective to the usual focus of postmodern/poststructuralist theory, but it does, at times, overshadow his equally interesting analysis of the texts themselves. Driscoll's engagement with contemporary British fiction and critical theory is grounded in his distinction between ideological and political readings of literature. He claims that contemporary theory, particularly postmodern theory, reinforces the dominant ideology of the ruling culture, which focuses on the individual "fluid, flexible decentred subject" (1), at the expense of what Terry Eagleton terms "collective, and effective, political action" (qtd. in Driscoll 3). Consequently, postmodern readings of contemporary fiction present "ideologically complicit readings" which merely confirm the ideology of the novels themselves (18). Thus rather than critiquing the class-based ideology of contemporary fiction, postmodern readings collude with the erasure of class from the discussion. Such an approach seems predicated on the belief that literature transcends ideology to present universal experiences. By contrast, Driscoll argues that "literature is not so much what enables us to see through ideology . . . but that instead it is thoroughly ideological and may actually stop us from seeing certain things" (38). For Driscoll, what ideological readings prevent us from seeing is the persistence of class concerns in contemporary literature and culture. Following Raymond Williams, Driscoll proposes that we need to read "against literature," and indeed against postmodern theory, in order to [End Page 385] create a criticism that is truly critical (18). For Driscoll, a truly critical approach to contemporary literature is one that resists its absorption into postmodern theory and uncovers how postmodern identity politics have not replaced or resolved class issues but merely translated them into new terms. Driscoll recognizes the difficulties that beset such a critical approach to contemporary fiction. He notes that while "it is possible to seek out the bourgeois ideology that sneakily lies buried within Evelyn Waugh, or Virginia Woolf or Ezra Pound," critics seem to have a blind spot when it comes to tracing "the bourgeois ideology of our own moment" in the work of contemporary authors (38). Similarly, he claims that the current climate of political correctness hampers criticism. Thus he claims that reading the work of gay writer Alan Hollinghurst against the grain "is...

A Brief Take on the Australian Novel

This study seeks to confirm the originality of the concept of reading, its longevity, continuity and semantic richness in Arab culture, because the concept of reading is one of the most widespread concepts in our contemporary world as this concept is characterized by its richness, openness and complexity, so it was embraced by many scientific fields in its conceptual system as well as their use in extensive metaphorical connotations, in order to understand them, require a grasp of the roots and contexts of their use. The study stands on the root of the concept of reading in the Arabic lexicon and a brief pause through which it shows its positional load and how its sensory significance tops the load of the lexical material, followed by other semantics belonging to sensory areas lighter than it until it gets complicated little by little while it is on its way to abstraction .Then the study stops at the concept of reading in contemporary literature and trying to find a common content between the predicates of the lexical material and between what the idiomatic concept pulses in the contemporary world, in order to explain the semantic absorptive content of the subject matter which softens the complexity of what the terminological concept has ended in contemporary literature on its openness and bifurcation and complexity

d iscussions of the nature and fate of Australian literary studies-at least in the Australian university context-more often than not focus on what is taught and the institutional challenges that confront academics in the field. 2these are certainly valid concerns, and ones that are voiced in relation to other humanities disciplines in the contemporary university.Yet, as important as these matters are, the attention paid to them tends to occlude a number of perhaps equally significant considerations, namely how we teach the subject, to whom, and how our students learn.this essay considers the utility of novel approaches to the teaching of Australian literature using digital media technology: namely, digital narratives. it reflects on the experience of using digital essays in an advanced undergraduate course on Australian literature; considers the benefits and challenges of doing so; and offers some advice to teachers considering similar strategies.At the risk of alienating some, one could contend that from the outside, the university teaching of Australian literature looks fairly conservative.this is certainly the case in Australia, and we suspect it applies elsewhere.First of all, the field relies on pedagogical methods inherited from early twentieth-century english literary studies: in the manner of teaching and learning employed, there is not much that superficially distinguishes Australian literature from other topics in literary studies.Moreover, the residuum of cultural nationalism as an organizing principle and raison d'ètre of the field-despite the best efforts of scholars to critique and oppose it-incites the ambivalence of many contemporary students toward Australian literary studies (on this point see penn-edwards).perhaps the most pressing challenge for teachers of Australian literature-and for literary studies academics generally-is to develop ways of teaching our subject that are responsive to contemporary trends in pedagogical practices.And this also entails being cognizant of the environments-specifically the virtual and online environments-within which many of our students will work when they graduate.in this respect, it is becoming more urgent to consider how we take advantage of progress in digital technologies.Advocates of Web 2.0 technologies in education,

This book uses the conceptual framework of animism, the belief in the spiritual qualities of nonhuman matter, to analyze representations of trauma in postcolonial fiction from Nigeria and India. Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature initiates a conversation between contemporary trauma literatures of Nigeria and India on animism. As postcolonial nations move farther away from the event of decolonization in real time, the experience of trauma take place within and is generated by an increasingly precarious environment of resource scarcity, over-accelerated industrialization, and ecological crisis. These factors combine to create mixed environments marked by constantly changing interactions between human and nonhuman matter. Examining novels by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Jhumpa Lahiri, Nnedi Okorafor, and Arundhati Roy, the book considers how animist beliefs shape the aesthetic representation of trauma in postcolonial literature, paying special attention to complex metaphor and narrative structure. These literary texts challenge the conventional wisdom that working through trauma involves achieving physical and psychic integrity in a stable environment. Instead, a type of provisional but substantive healing emerges in an animist relationship between human trauma victims and nonhuman matter. In this context, animism becomes a pivotal way to reframe the process of working through trauma. Offering a rich framework for analyzing trauma in postcolonial literature, this book will be of interest to scholars of postcolonial literature, Nigerian literature and South Asian literature.

The subject of this paper being contemporary Australian rangelands literature, I have restricted the study to literature of the decade to 1994, with focus on 1992-1994. I acknowledge recent informative studies, but have developed an individual perspective. In addition to considering recent novels and factual books I have given attention to newspaper and magazine accounts, as these give the most immediate observations of the rangelands, and attitudes towards them and their inhabitants. Key trends that emerge are perceptions of the rangelands as pristine - probably the one continuum since the commencement of written records about Australia; the entirely contrasting view of pastoralists as destroyers of rangelands; and recognition of Aboriginal spirituality as significant in caring for the land. The trends are not, however, entirely in the one direction, as I indicate by presenting both the positive and negative views presented by a select number of writers.

A literatura na matriz curricular, no atual modelo brasileiro de educação, precisa contemplar a dupla função de formar o leitor literário e o cidadão crítico e receptivo às mudanças sociais e às diferenças de gênero. Diante disso, surge a singular necessidade da abordagem do feminismo na educação básica, a fim de disseminar a ideia de desconstrução de preconceitos preestabelecidos com relação à mulher na sociedade tradicional e patriarcal. Assim, por meio de pesquisa bibliográfica e interventiva, este trabalho tem o objetivo de apresentar às comunidades acadêmica e educacional abordagens metodológicas e literárias, que oportunizem a relação literatura e leitor, destacando a temática empoderamento feminino para o trabalho docente que fomente a formação do leitor literário. É intento desta pesquisa, ainda, discutir sobre o empoderamento feminino, bem como o papel e o espaço da mulher na história do Brasil, e na literatura clássica e contemporânea. O resultado desta pesquisa é a proposta didática apresentada que, por sua vez, torna-se uma alternativa para a formação do leitor, quando, a partir de uma mediação professoral adequada aos objetivos pretendidos e por meio de literatura feminina clássica e contemporânea, fomente nos estudantes o desejo da leitura literária.

My thesis attempts two things: firstly, it tests how useful the Anthropocene concept is for considering literature, by reading it as an umbrella term for different socio-eco-political issues in the specific context of Australia (in terms of broad themes including colonisation, farming, mining, bioethics, technology, and environmental justice) and by applying this to readings of selected contemporary Australian literary texts. Secondly, it challenges the Anthropocene’s decline-narrative (as in ‘humans have destroyed nature’) by proposing an alternative concept of ‘cosmological readings’ that foregrounds radical interconnectedness, wholeness, and reciprocity between humans and the environment. From a wider perspective, my project seeks to contribute to the new field of the Environmental Humanities in Australia and beyond by exploring the crucial role of literature in times of unprecedented ecological crisis.

This book presents an innovative and imaginative reading of contemporary Australian literature in the context of unprecedented ecological crisis. The Australian continent has seen significant, rapid changes to its cultures and land-use from the impact of British colonial rule, yet there is a rich history of Indigenous land-ethics and cosmological thought. By using the age-old idea of 'cosmos'-the order of the world-to foreground ideas of a good order and chaos, reciprocity and more-than-human agency, this book interrogates the Anthropocene in Australia, focusing on notions of colonisation, farming, mining, bioethics, technology, environmental justice and sovereignty. It offers 'cosmological readings' of a diverse range of authors-Indigenous and non-Indigenous-as a challenge to the Anthropocene's decline-narrative. As a result, it reactivates 'cosmos' as an ethical vision and a transculturally important counter-concept to the Anthropocene. Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell argues that the arts can help us envision radical cosmologies of being in and with the planet, and to address the very real social and environmental problems of our era. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and postcolonial, transcultural and Indigenous studies, with a primary focus on Australian, New Zealand, Oceanic and Pacific area studies.

Review of] Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell: Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature

This article proposes that the concept of contemporary Polish literature’s literary canon (including recent literature) should be defined in a relational manner, accounting for this canon’s communicative function in international relations—in this case, Polish-Ukrainian relations. The canon encompasses a time-tested collection of literary texts and a set of books that facilitate understanding of the literary past while creating a specific place for mutual understanding in our place and time, indicating the existence of an anthropological community. In this sense, the literary canon should expand successively. Translations and translation research are key contributors in this formation, and it in turn fosters comparative studies, which are among Polish literary studies’ most important challenges. A comparative reflection on national literatures — including Polish and Ukrainian — in the context of the borderland experience, viewed through a contemporary lens, requires addressing questions about whether, and if so, what models of coexistence have been developed; what their artistic representations entail; and what place the individual occupies within them. Do these cultures remain separated, in a state of conflict, or in a positively understood form of contact? Is collaboration between them possible, and if so, on what grounds? Does it stem from processes of assimilation and integration imposed by a dominant group and its language, or from dialogical integration grounded in partnership and mutual respect? This example – one among many – clearly demonstrates that any reading of contemporary Polish literature is incomplete without reference to the Ukrainian context, just as earlier it would have been impossible to fully understand selected poems by Bolesław Leśmian, essays by Jerzy Stempowski, prose by Leopold Buczkowski or Włodzimierz Odojewski, or the poetry and fiction of Józef Wittlin without that same context. Without reference to the works of Yevhen Malaniuk and the legacy of the “Executed Renaissance,” the poetic and ideological dimensions of Józef Łobodowski’s writings would remain obscure; without engagement with Yurii Andrukhovych’s oeuvre, the prose of Andrzej Stasiuk would lose part of its depth.

Knowledge about carnality and its limits provides the agenda for much of the fiction written for adolescent readers today, yet there exists little critical engagement with the ways in which it has been represented in the young adult novel in either discursive, ideological, or rhetorical forms. Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature is a pioneering study that addresses these methodological and contextual gaps. Focusing on texts produced since the late-1980s, and drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Kathryn James shows how representations of death in young adult literature are invariably associated with issues of sexuality, gender, and power. Under particular scrutiny are the trope of woman/death, the eroticizing and sexualizing of death, and the ways in which the gendered subject is represented in dialogue with the processes of death, dying, and grief. Through close readings of historical literature, fantasy fictions, realistic novels, dead-narrator tales, and texts from genres including Gothic, horror, and post-disaster, James reveals not only how cultural discourses influence and are influenced by literary works, but how relevant the study of death is to adolescent fiction--the literature of becoming.