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The Glossary is a fictocritical work which accompanies the novel, New Moon Through Glass, written for my doctorate that encorporates fiction, poetry, analytic and critical text, and which ‘writes back’ to the novel without the interpretive gesture and in doing so interrogates the art of fiction via a fictocritical critique. The generic glossary (a collection of glosses) encapsulates the ‘interpretive gesture’ par excellence — the hermeneutical exercise that criticism’s role has widely been thought to be. Its earliest, medieval form as a commentary (or series of commentaries), translation or exegesis in the margins of or between the lines of a text, reiterates the glossary’s ostensible purpose to explicate rather than create ‘meaning’. As a fictocritical work, The Glossary therefore both interrupts the monolithic architecture of the text through the techniques of the cut and the stitch, and also, by ‘reading between the lines’ of the novel, provides alternative readings; a space for other voices, other texts. In the process the project repositions the glossary before the novel (a reversal of the usual order) inciting a series of readings and re-readings which establish a practice of critical fictionalising and the fictionalising of the critical and an incitement to read in this manner. In the performance, The Glossary ventures to open this Pandora’s Box and in the process reflects on what, as a practitioner, writing is, what reading is, and what is critical practice and what creative. The Glossary is a performance of a distinction put by Bathes as a ‘thinking through’ rather than ‘a residue of critical thought’ (1985: 284) and therefore demands to be read as a fictocritical The Glossary was arrived at after much research and experimentation in my fiction writing practice with footnotes, asides and summarizing (‘the story so far’ style) prefaces or segues and above all definitions, a fascination which might be summarised by the distinction that Charlotte Brontë drew between writing that was ‘real’ and writing that was ‘true’. Fiction often requires realism in order to ring true, and yet the elements of language that give it force owe nothing to realism — its power lies in its imagery, its symmetry, its poetry all of which foreground textuality and intertextuality in a manner congruent with the fictocritical project. The Glossary, ostensibly there to confirm and stabilise knowledge, language and reading practices, shows, by fictionalising the critical, the dependent ordering and silences through the art of character in this knowledge architecture. Far from keeping an ‘objective’ distance, The Glossary generates a parallel text to the novel in which the voice of the author ‘speaks’, and in doing so has much to say, by its multi-vocal presence, about authorial intentions (and anxieties), slippages, ruptures and textual transparencies, opacities and excess; about the ways in which writing is both knowledge and being, knowing and making. The Glossary grew (rhizomically though not randomly) from textual asides, after thoughts and back stories, parallel and divergent interests, arguments, lyricisms, associations, allusions and theories. Eventually The Glossary became a piece of writing performing what could not ‘make it’ into the work of fiction. That a glossary is made up of ����entries���� proved an enlivening form, which generated a different kind of writing practice and a different kind of writing, perhaps not dissimilar to a web log. In making this comparison I am referencing Kerryn Goldsworthy’s comments that ‘blogging’, as ‘dynamic thinking-in-action’, sets its form apart from traditional writing and ‘creates a shift away from the consumer-producer model’ by destabilising the notion of a one-way transaction, ‘active writer producer to passive reader-consumer’. Each entry in The Glossary is a jumping off point for text to grow either from the point-of-view of the writer or reader, and each item simultaneously encourages a non-linear reading with regard to itself out of which possibilities are generated — as a body of text; the ‘self’ to which it constantly refers — and the novel it appends. The Glossary allows space for ‘undisicplined’ writing which does not conform to the teleological narrative of the thriller genre and in doing so, offers a radically democratic opportunity for the reader (who along with the writer also composes the story) to join in the process and the practice and understand how in ‘working through’ any text we are subconsciously glossing and deducing as we go. Some entries in The Glossary relate to specifics in the novel. Others to novels which haunt the text or other texts dreamed of, wished for or forgotten. Many of the subjects of The Glossary are familiar terms in literary and critical discourse examined in the process of writing. Still others relate to identity and to doubling, as a fictional device, but also as textual possibility. The counterpoint between the two texts — glossary and novel — holds other dialogues and polylogues: the intimate linkage between love and murder or desire and violence; disappearances — both textual and familial; childhood, memory and, motherhood; voice, reading, writing- (as well as reading-)blocks; the flâneur; psychoanalysis and dreams; collage; and the house as a metaphor for the body or the text. Certainly The Glossary presents an occasion for writing, an exercise, an exegesis and, where necessary, an excuse: ‘Only paper offers the tactile complexities of the origami life, the papier mache existence. (The Glossary p. 84) / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Abstract not available

Abstract not available

v. 1 [Novel]: And the Word was Song [Embargoed] -- v. 2 [Exegesis]: The return to mother: exegesis accompanying the novel: And the Word was Song / The novel manuscript And the Word was Song is a work in five parts, structurally (and very loosely) mirroring the first five books of The Old Testament. It is the story of Lily May, a young woman who travels around the world trying to find meaning in her life after her prostitute, heroin-addicted mother has died. Throughout her journeys, Lily May comes into contact with people who have issues with sex and / or addiction, always forcing her to remember her mother, a loving yet entirely flawed woman. Some of her fellow travellers are neglected children; some are street-smart gypsies; some are lovers; all are unknowingly Lily May’s mother substitutes. Through an impending birth, a return to her childhood home and an unexpected discovery of a half-sister, Lily May is able to end her journey and accept her mother for who she was: an imperfect woman who gave birth to her, then loved and cared for her the best that she could. The story is about spirituality, sexuality, love, addiction, acquiescence — and Elvis. Ultimately it is about mothers. The exegetical essay is a reflection on the journey from daughter to mother. I discuss the structuring of my novel manuscript and explore ways in which memory is accessed in the recreation of the maternal bond. Through an imaginary conversation with my mother about the legitimacy of psychoanalysis in re-evaluating mothers and maternity, I look at three concepts of mother substitution, considering ways in which the subconscious reconstructs the mother in the relationships women have. I deliberate on homecomings, both literary and personal, and consider the ethics of using my mother’s stories to further my own story. / Thesis (PhD) -- School of Humanities, 2006

Reproduced from the copy in the University of Adelaide.

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By the 1970s the international markets had begun to change and the region’s industries were becoming less competitive. Mines began to close. Factories that had operated night and day fell silent. Their gates closed and they became “brownfield” sites in need of restoration. For the over past 20 years, city planners regenerated these derelict industrial lands in different ways especially focus on renaturalizing them. Less attention is being paid to them as active and strategic roles in contemporary affairs. Today, people’s thinking about this issue demands more the character of sentimental stimulus- for either the re-creation or preservation of past industrial sites- than of visionary or ambitious reprogrammed landscape projects. A combination of nostalgia and consumerism drives this desire while suppressing ambitions to experience and invent.