Terre sacrée: spectralité et réalisme magique dans la littérature australienne contemporaine

Scientific conference (2010, March 19)

The Legacy of Invention: Determinism and Metafiction in Janet Frame's Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun

in Ramsey-Kurz, Helga; Ratheiser, Ulla (Eds.) Antipodean Childhoods: Growing Up in Australia and New Zealand (2010)

History of English Literature, Part II

Learning material (2010)

Mabo and After: Trauma Envy in White Australia

Conference (2009, March 26)

"Conquest of Surfaces": Aesthetic and Political Violence in the Work of Janet Frame

in Cronin, Jan; Drichel, Simone (Eds.) Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame (2009)

The Legacy of Invention: Determinism and Metafiction in Janet Frame's Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun

in Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2009), 45(1),

This essay offers a close reading of Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun, a tale for children often thought to be unique in the corpus of Janet Frame in that its implied reading public compelled the ... [more ▼]

This essay offers a close reading of Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun, a tale for children often thought to be unique in the corpus of Janet Frame in that its implied reading public compelled the author to keep her distance from her usual preoccupation with the great negative themes of twentieth-century consciousness. Yet Frame’s declaration in an interview that this was her favourite among her own published books should alert us to the possibility that thematic continuities subterraneously connect it to the rest of the work. In particular, the exploration of animal life encouraged by the genre can be seen to be paradigmatic of her interest in alternative ontologies and to encode the concern with creativity which is a touchstone of her entire output. Typically, too, the figure of the artist – in this case, of the story-teller – is invested with a redemptive value for the beleaguered individual, and cannot be separated from a metafictional mode of representation which is possibly unexpected in what purports to be a simple fairy tale. [less ▲]

Towards Another Summer

Conference (2008, November 28)

Janet Frame's Bestiary

Conference (2008, July 04)

Frame’s concern with animals is multifaceted and represents, in some of its manifestations, one of the more challenging aspects of her work. Indeed her valorisation of animal life seems inseparable from ... [more ▼]

Frame’s concern with animals is multifaceted and represents, in some of its manifestations, one of the more challenging aspects of her work. Indeed her valorisation of animal life seems inseparable from her preoccupation with death and from her belief in the need for human beings to embark on a course in ‘death education’. Such a thematic collocation may be unexpected but it is not unique to Frame – witness the comment of Elizabeth Costello, a fictional novelist and animal rights activist in J. M. Coetzee’s eponymous publication, to the effect that ‘if we are capable of thinking our own death, why on earth should we not be capable of thinking our way into the life of a bat?’ The reverse, then, may also be true, and in Frame’s work it is posited that the imaginative challenge represented by animals is relevant, however laterally, to an illumination of the experience of death. In other words Frame’s altruistic receptiveness to alternative sensations of being is not subordinated primarily, as in Coetzee, to a militant struggle against the abuse of animals by human beings, to be fought in the real world; instead, the New Zealand writer privileges aesthetic considerations, as the lives of animals are placed in her work under the magnifying glass of the artist’s attention, with the result that the ability to disentangle deceptive taxonomies emerges as another hallmark of genuine creativity as she sees it. This is why Frame quotes the words of André Malraux: ‘It looks like a very simple thing to see a man where there is a man, and not a camel, a horse, or spider’. The not-so-simple implication is that, beyond traditional categories of vision, there is room for in-depth modes of perception that will shuffle and blur taken-for-granted ontologies. My intention is to explore this concern which is pervasive in Frame’s work, but also to have a look particularly at her recent, posthumous publication, Towards Another Summer (2007), where the protagonist imagines herself as a migratory bird. [less ▲]

Intertextual Transformations in the Work of Janet Frame

Conference (2007, September 27)

Janet Frame's Self-Writing

Conference (2007, June 02)