106-406 Contested Sites

Usually admission to the postgraduate diploma or fourth year honours in English, see Honours entry, or admission to Bachelor of Creative Arts (honours).

This subject offers a space for reflection and debate in areas often neglected in postmodern perspectives; that is, in the politics and ethics of writing. Drawing upon a wide range of imaginative, critical and theoretical texts, the subject focuses on the text as a site of contestation in terms of intertextuality and interspatiality. The focus is on both competing narratives and voices (in terms of the politics of gender, ethnicity, cultural experience); and the sites ('real' or 'fabulous') conjured or performed by the writing. The subject enables students to explore the limits of writing, to examine writing as testimony and writing as contestation, without discounting writing as productive of new modes of subjectivity and desire. By taking into account the silenced stories or histories that any writing involves, the subject should give students a chance to reflect and exchange on the theoretical, political and ethical implications of choices made in their creative writing practice.

Written work totalling 5000 words for 4th year, 6000 words for masters students.

A subject reader will be available.

• M Bakhtin, L Emerson & M Holquist (trans), M Holquist (ed), The Dialogic Imagination. University of Texas Press.
• S Felman & D Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Routledge.
• P Joris, P Celan (trans), Breathturn. Sun and Moon.