Essays
The Curse of Formalism
One of the explanations for minimalism’s success in challenging formalism in the 1960s is that it wasn’t really a challenge at all. Minimalism may well have functioned as a clean critique of abstract expressionism’s perceived excesses, but it wasn’t a great rupture with formalism.
The most important question
The most important question was posed by Marguerite of Navarre, in the 1540s. She posed it, perhaps, at her favorite thermal spa, Cauterets, in the Pyrenees south of Lourdes. It was, ‘Can a woman know true love and retain her virtue?’ Marguerite was a the sister of François I of France, and the wife of the King of Navarre, a much younger man. She was a poet, a reformist and an intellectual.
Signs for the Soul
The reading Coetzee offers of Gerald Murnane is interesting in a number of ways: it not only tells us things that Coetzee sees in Murnane, it tells us that Coetzee considers Murnane’s work to be important, and worthy of wider attention. It also tells us that Coetzee sees things in Murnane that concern him, in every sense of the word concern.
For love and hunger
In the year that I first became ill, I recognised the physicality of Teresa’s hunger, and I carried it with me for years, although the rest of For Love Alone did not stir me – I was nineteen, and probably too callow, too cold and self-obsessed to fully understand it. But in the last two years, I started hearing so many writers talk again about Christina Stead.
Literature and Fashion
Much of what I read in the field of criticism these days is not purely literary criticism… but essays which are also fictions, perhaps referring to literary works in passing, in order to reference, interrogate and explore culture: its fashions, its trends, its past and future.
In the Same Boat
Have Australians overcome the cultural cringe and learned, as Phillips hoped they would, ‘the art of being unselfconsciously ourselves’? I am less sanguine about rumours of cringe’s demise…I think an example of how the cringe currently operates can be found by examining an increasingly marginal – if symbolically important – cultural form: the single-author short story collection.
Parallel fates
It is conventional wisdom in the publishing business that newspaper reviews, even negative ones, can help to sell books. But while book publishers are beset by structural changes to their industry … the newspaper business is suffering an even more painful struggle, to evolve or die.