Emmett Stinson

Emmett Stinson is Head of English at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of Satirizing Modernism and Known Unknowns.

Works By Emmett Stinson

Minor Threats
Like Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Easton’s The Magpie Wing is an anxious novel about anxious characters in anxious times. It seeks to register this anxiety in all of its contradictions and complexities, but thankfully does not want to resolve...
27 Feb. 2022
The Ethics of Evaluation
'is this book worth reading? A book review—while it can be many things—is not really a review unless it offers some form of explicit or implicit evaluation in a way that meaningfully answers this question.'
22 May. 2017
Quiet Conversations in a Very Noisy Room: Tilting at Windmills
Whether or not little magazines are idealistic enterprises, they are essential to contemporary literary culture: they showcase new and emerging writers; provide a training ground for editors and administrators; offer more extended literary debates...
13 Oct. 2015
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 investmen...
12 June. 2015
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.
2 Sept. 2014
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 su...
31 May. 2013
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
25 Mar. 2013