Resisting fixation in Gail Jones' Sorry and Five Bells

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

Abstract

This chapter engages with an Australian Research Council project, “OtherWorlds: Forms of World Literature”, which involved four writers, Gail Jones, Alexis Wright, J.M. Coetzee and Nicholas Jose, along with myself and Ben Etherington. It is therefore informed by two sets of ideas that underpin the project. The first is that literature is a kind of thinking, and that writers think seriously about the nature of the world through their creative practice. The second involves a provocation, first made by J.M. Coetzee in establishing a series of seminars at Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under the umbrella of a project called “Literatures of the South”, but taken up by Gail Jones along with Coetzee in an event they co-convened in Sydney in April 2019 called “Writing from the South”. This provocation involves the assertion that some kind of meaningful affinity might be drawn between writers based in the Southern Hemisphere.1 Such an affinity might well be invented, (a kind of “worldmaking”, as Chris Andrews contends),2 or it might result from environmental and historical affinities, shared “biomes” (a term discussed by Alexander Beecroft, in relation to the cultural contexts that allow certain kinds of works to emerge), or shared experiences of colonialisation, with its violent confrontations with Indigenous peoples, and the waves of immigration that followed (Halford “Coetzee in Buenos Aires”; Beecroft).
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInner and Outer Worlds: Gail Jones' Fiction
EditorsAnthony Uhlmann
Place of PublicationSydney, N.S.W.
PublisherSydney University Press
Pages75-90
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)9781743327791
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

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