Week in Review

‘A mature critical culture isn’t monotheistic and it isn’t the role of a journal such as the SRB to massage consensus. Rather, we’re open to disruptions, to provocation, and to a diversity of critical perspectives. We expect our contributors to be courageous, ethical and independent in their criticism and we will defend them if their conclusions prove unpopular, as is not infrequently the case.’ SRB editor Catriona Menzies-Pike on the results of our first ever reader survey and the year ahead at the SRB.

‘“Let’s spare ourselves the effort to credit our enemies with too complex motivations”, urged the historian Jean-Noël Jeanneney in Le Monde. The opinion columns of the serious media, from the centre-left Libération to the right-wing Figaro, have obliged. In doing so, they have offered yet another illustration of intellectuals’ and artists’ role as the servile “guard dogs” of elite political hegemony – a status dissected by a long line of critique extending via Chomsky, Marcuse and Paul Nizan back at least as far as Marx and Engels.’ From Paris, Nick Riemer on the rhetoric of Republican values.

‘It’s been my experience that the Australian literary world and the journalists who cover it overlook the more complex perspectives and needs of those who are marginalised in our literary communities.’ Michelle Cahill on the myopia of the current arts funding debate.

‘Perhaps the question that Ubud should prompt Indonesians and those who follow Indonesian affairs to ask is not “How can such censorship be happening?”, but rather, “Why are we shocked anew whenever censorship like this happens?” The answer to this new question may lie in the bifurcated narrative many of us rely on when thinking about recent Indonesian history.’ Tiffany Tsao on freedom of literary expression in Indonesia

‘The Booker needs this year’s winner, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, and, fortunately on this occasion the judges haven’t gotten in the way. The novel, however, does not need the prize. This isn’t because it already had won a number of prizes; but because its imaginative force is self-evident and does not require the objectification of value that prizes provide. This is not to say that everyone who reads the novel will enjoy it, but that the enjoyment of any given reader is secondary to the novel’s own originality of conception and technical execution. Nor is this to say that its execution is perfect – like anything new, its failings are an essential part of it.’ Ben Etherington on Marlon James and post-independence West Indian fiction.

‘When we talk about the woman writer in 2015, how then do we situate the vital insights of intersectional and trans feminism at the centre of our discussions? This, to me, is the most pressing challenge posed by the Stella Count.’ SRB editor Catriona Menzies-Pike on gender, critical culture and the Stella Count

‘What Svetlana Aleksievich has achieved over nearly four decades and in five books is to unveil the hidden lives and recollections of ordinary Soviet and post-Soviet people by interviewing thousands of them, inter alia: Red Army women veterans; Afghan war veterans; veterans of the Chernobyl’ nuclear disaster; and most recently, post-Soviet memories of a deceased world.’ Historian Roger Markwick on the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature.

‘Any author who’s been in the business longer than five years can tell you that we’ve had to change our professional practices in response to the transformed circumstances in the industry.’ This week the results of an extensive survey of over 1000 Australian authors assessing the impact on authorship of changing circumstances in the book industry were published by Macquarie University’s Faculty of Business and Economics. Sophie Masson considers the findings.

‘It is the subtle duty of literary festivals and their variations to assure writers, with a vague but potent authority, that they are – despite their knowing self-doubts and anxieties – “writers”.’ Novelist Luke Carman on the festival circuit.’

The brief and painful Brandis era of arts policy was marked by the sector’s loss of confidence in the government’s consultation processes. If Mitch Fifield can provide more effective channels of communication than open letters, he will have a headstart on his predecessor.