Emmett Stinson

Emmett Stinson is Head of English at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of Satirizing Modernism and Known Unknowns.
All essays by Emmett Stinson
Is It Fundable? Satin Island by Tom McCarthy
Tom McCarthy is an interesting writer. I mean this in a precise way: Sianne Ngai, in Our Aesthetic Categories defines the ‘interesting’ as an important contemporary aesthetic category that ‘has been associated with genres with an unusual investment in theory’.
Remote Viewing: A Million Windows by Gerald Murnane
As the narrator of A Million Windows repeatedly reaffirms, the most important compositional principle in Murnane’s work is a genuine and thoroughgoing respect for the space of fiction as something radically different from everyday reality.
Late Recognition: The Letters of William Gaddis
The publication of The Letters of William Gaddis is significant because it presents the first direct and unveiled access to this ‘reclusive’ author. For those of us who know and love Gaddis’s work, however, there is something discomfiting about such personal revelations.
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.