The Future of Australian Literature
Sydney PENs latest event gathered eminent academics and authors to discuss Australian literature, and does it have a future? Sydney PEN Young Writers Committee member Jeff Errington was there and in this week's post he takes a look at the important role readers play in our literature's future.
There has been an interesting amount of response to the recent Sydney PEN event Australian literature: does it have a future?…my answer is: God I hope so!
Professor Elizabeth Webby opened the event by contextualising one of Sydney PENs first members - Dorothy Mackellar - as the friend of Joseph Conrad, who was at the first PEN meeting in London. Professor Webby went on to say that Mackellar would have been horrified that such a discussion has even had to of taken place. The event itself has already been nicely summarised by Rosemary Neill, but I would like to chart its waters a little more.
I found Delia Falconer's comments particularly illuminating. She warned that there was a danger in conceptualising what she and other authors are doing as ‘creating Australian literature’ (and Emily Maguire echoed these sentiments). The danger is that we fall into nationalism and all its ugly implications. She also led the audience upon another path: as a fall out of post-modern theory, books are not seen as things crafted by an author but as products of something that flows through an author, so that they appear but of something “ethereal and disembodied,” she said. And now, with the rise of university course-readers, students study “bits and pieces” of books. Well with the recent death of Jean Baudrillard (a friend told me that they are putting his ashes into the Seine, how pertinent as last time I was in Paris its river smelt like sewerage), and an exhaustion of postmodernism, lets hope that authors as people who carefully and beautifully craft their books are allowed to exist once more. And as readers we should read that work in its entirety.
John Hughes told us that the problem was not of literature but the reading of literature in general. There is too much pop culture taught and not enough of Chaucer and Beckett. Well, hurrah for readers! Australian literature is still being written and is being written very well. But Australian literature without readers is like a mortar with no pestle. One thing that I believe is missing is great Aussie readers. Where is our V.S. Pritchett, or Kenneth Rexroth, or Edmund Wilson? Someone who can throw a guiding light on what and who’s scribbling is truly illuminating our society’s darkness. Wilson not only introduced the American public to the modernist writers who were emerging out of Paris (see his wonderful book Axel’s Castle) but he rescued the reputations of fledging authors, primarily William Faulkner.
If you consider yourself a great Aussie reader (if you are feeling any cultural cringe race down your spine, just ignore it) then its time to read and read well AND promote what you think is important in Australian literature to your friends, to book clubs and perhaps put something’s online, call up a radio station or at the very least add it as a post to this blog. Australian literature is not doomed as long as us (I mean its readers) still read it. Does anyone know of any great Aussie readers that we should be keeping an eye out for? Or if you are a great Aussie reader, what and who should we be reading? Emily Maguire told us that “there is no set thing that is Australian literature.” And her novels are a great example. Urbane, sexy and cosmopolitan, and not a sheep dip in sight. Perhaps Australian literature is (like Australian society in general) undergoing a period of questioning and change. There is the Australia of the drought infected farmers, recent immigrants to the western suburbs of Sydney, the rioters of Cronulla and Macquarie Fields, the private schools kids of the Eastern Suburbs and the homeless who sleep on the footpaths of Kings Cross. If a writer was to emerge from here, which one would ‘capture’ Australia? That’s not the right question. The right question is, “Who is poetically capturing their own experience of Australia?” Again, I’m looking for great Aussie readers to tell me and others: who and what should we be reading?
One thing I must add as a current student at UTS and recent graduate of Sydney University is the general lifestyle of students today. Some students are too lazy to read lots of books cover to cover. But there is another dimension that we must uncover. In the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s students were paid to be at Uni and, perhaps more importantly, Sydney was still an affordable city. Now even with a small amount of Austudy or Youth Allowance, students still need to work a lot just to fund their studies (and still knowing that they will graduate in debt at the end of it all.) And that’s only if they can get Austudy or Youth Allowance. If you can’t get it, you need to work four days a week, attend classes two days a week and in the spare time that’s left try to do the readings. Is it any wonder why professors don’t assign five or six novels at roughly eight hundred pages per book? Students are unable to find the time to read such a dense work, and to read it with the concentrated attention required, after spending all day working office admin, selling jeans, waiting tables etc. Yes the demise of funding to the humanities is a huge problem. And most students would be happy to pay attention, but they have an eight hour shift to work tonight so they hope to deal with it later.
One very interesting piece of news emerged from the question time. Apparently Giramondo Publishing are publishing a list of forgotten Australian Classics. This is fascinating, does anybody have any more information about this?
Read more!
There has been an interesting amount of response to the recent Sydney PEN event Australian literature: does it have a future?…my answer is: God I hope so!
Professor Elizabeth Webby opened the event by contextualising one of Sydney PENs first members - Dorothy Mackellar - as the friend of Joseph Conrad, who was at the first PEN meeting in London. Professor Webby went on to say that Mackellar would have been horrified that such a discussion has even had to of taken place. The event itself has already been nicely summarised by Rosemary Neill, but I would like to chart its waters a little more.
I found Delia Falconer's comments particularly illuminating. She warned that there was a danger in conceptualising what she and other authors are doing as ‘creating Australian literature’ (and Emily Maguire echoed these sentiments). The danger is that we fall into nationalism and all its ugly implications. She also led the audience upon another path: as a fall out of post-modern theory, books are not seen as things crafted by an author but as products of something that flows through an author, so that they appear but of something “ethereal and disembodied,” she said. And now, with the rise of university course-readers, students study “bits and pieces” of books. Well with the recent death of Jean Baudrillard (a friend told me that they are putting his ashes into the Seine, how pertinent as last time I was in Paris its river smelt like sewerage), and an exhaustion of postmodernism, lets hope that authors as people who carefully and beautifully craft their books are allowed to exist once more. And as readers we should read that work in its entirety.
John Hughes told us that the problem was not of literature but the reading of literature in general. There is too much pop culture taught and not enough of Chaucer and Beckett. Well, hurrah for readers! Australian literature is still being written and is being written very well. But Australian literature without readers is like a mortar with no pestle. One thing that I believe is missing is great Aussie readers. Where is our V.S. Pritchett, or Kenneth Rexroth, or Edmund Wilson? Someone who can throw a guiding light on what and who’s scribbling is truly illuminating our society’s darkness. Wilson not only introduced the American public to the modernist writers who were emerging out of Paris (see his wonderful book Axel’s Castle) but he rescued the reputations of fledging authors, primarily William Faulkner.
If you consider yourself a great Aussie reader (if you are feeling any cultural cringe race down your spine, just ignore it) then its time to read and read well AND promote what you think is important in Australian literature to your friends, to book clubs and perhaps put something’s online, call up a radio station or at the very least add it as a post to this blog. Australian literature is not doomed as long as us (I mean its readers) still read it. Does anyone know of any great Aussie readers that we should be keeping an eye out for? Or if you are a great Aussie reader, what and who should we be reading? Emily Maguire told us that “there is no set thing that is Australian literature.” And her novels are a great example. Urbane, sexy and cosmopolitan, and not a sheep dip in sight. Perhaps Australian literature is (like Australian society in general) undergoing a period of questioning and change. There is the Australia of the drought infected farmers, recent immigrants to the western suburbs of Sydney, the rioters of Cronulla and Macquarie Fields, the private schools kids of the Eastern Suburbs and the homeless who sleep on the footpaths of Kings Cross. If a writer was to emerge from here, which one would ‘capture’ Australia? That’s not the right question. The right question is, “Who is poetically capturing their own experience of Australia?” Again, I’m looking for great Aussie readers to tell me and others: who and what should we be reading?
One thing I must add as a current student at UTS and recent graduate of Sydney University is the general lifestyle of students today. Some students are too lazy to read lots of books cover to cover. But there is another dimension that we must uncover. In the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s students were paid to be at Uni and, perhaps more importantly, Sydney was still an affordable city. Now even with a small amount of Austudy or Youth Allowance, students still need to work a lot just to fund their studies (and still knowing that they will graduate in debt at the end of it all.) And that’s only if they can get Austudy or Youth Allowance. If you can’t get it, you need to work four days a week, attend classes two days a week and in the spare time that’s left try to do the readings. Is it any wonder why professors don’t assign five or six novels at roughly eight hundred pages per book? Students are unable to find the time to read such a dense work, and to read it with the concentrated attention required, after spending all day working office admin, selling jeans, waiting tables etc. Yes the demise of funding to the humanities is a huge problem. And most students would be happy to pay attention, but they have an eight hour shift to work tonight so they hope to deal with it later.
One very interesting piece of news emerged from the question time. Apparently Giramondo Publishing are publishing a list of forgotten Australian Classics. This is fascinating, does anybody have any more information about this?
posted by Sydney PEN at 2:04 pm
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