Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction

Grogan, Bridget

doi:10.1163/9789004365698

Cited by 6 publications

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“…Elaine Scarry, for example, in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1987), describes pain as inexpressible in language, even as obliterating the meaning-making function of language. As I have discussed elsewhere (Grogan 2014;2018), Julia Kristeva, in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), identifies two dimensions of language. These are: the symbolic, or the aspect of language that clearly and logically conveys meaning; and the semiotic, or the affective, bodily dimension of language, evident in extra-or pre-verbal factors such as rhythm, tone, hesitation and breathing.…”

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Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues” to First-Year Students

Grogan¹

2020

EaC

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This article reports on and discusses the experience of a contrapuntal approach to teaching poetry, explored during 2016 and 2017 in a series of introductory poetry lectures in the English 1 course at the University of Johannesburg. Drawing together two poems—Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues”—in a week of teaching in each year provided an opportunity for a comparison that encouraged students’ observations on poetic voice, racial identity, transhistorical and transcultural human experience, trauma and empathy. It also provided an opportunity to reflect on teaching practice within the context of decoloniality and to acknowledge the need for ongoing change and review in relation to it. In describing the contrapuntal teaching and study of these poems, and the different methods employed in the respective years of teaching them, I tentatively suggest that canonical Western and contemporary postcolonial poems may reflect on each other in unique and transformative ways. I further posit that poets and poems that engage students may open the way into initially “less relevant” yet ultimately rewarding poems, while remaining important objects of study in themselves.

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Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues” to First-Year Students

Grogan¹

2020

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“…In this desire to include the homosexual as the familiar "universal subject of a Patrick White novel", the specifics and differences of this figure and the writing are elided and remain quarantined from other ways in which White's fiction is discussed -the discourses of metaphysics or phenomenology, for instance. (McMahon, in McMahon and Olubas, 2010: 85-86) While later scholars have utilized queer theory as a means of challenging orthodox explorations of his fiction (McCann, 1998;McMahon, in McMahon and Olubas, 2010;1 Davidson 2010;Moore 2015Moore , 2018Grogan, 2018), they have tended to concentrate on later novels, such as The Twyborn Affair (1979) and Memoirs of Many in One (1987), where the queer valences are more overt. In her groundbreaking recent book, Reading Corporeality in Patrick White's Fiction: An Abject Dictatorship of the Flesh, Bridget Grogan includes a chapter dealing with The Aunt's Story and The Twyborn Affair.…”

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Flaunting dissonance: The queering of narrative and gender boundaries in Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story

Graham-Smith

2020

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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The Twyborn Affair (1979) is generally regarded as Patrick White’s covert “coming out” novel, followed by his frank “confession” in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). However, this article explores how even an earlier work such as The Aunt’s Story (1977/1948), from the Nobel laureate’s modernist phase, may be seen as a pre-text for the gay self, whereby the author stages incomplete representations of his own subaltern position in the characters he “becomes” in his writing. Through a series of textual feints, his persona is disseminated in the form of polyvalent alternative selves which belie any possibility for recuperation of a stable, authentic selfhood. White thereby refuses the univocal inscription of subjectivity upon which sexual hegemony is predicated. What I aim to do in this article is to extend the particularities of the novel’s writing strategies (found in the Jardin Exotique section, for example, which functions as a Foucauldian heterotopic space) into the province of gender. In doing so, I will show how the gay author, through the central character, Theodora Goodman’s protean identities and the deployment of competing narrative epistemologies, can fabricate alternative subject positions. These attest not only to the artificial technologies of gender constitution, but also function as remnants of White’s own divided status, brought about by his dissonant subaltern position in the borderlands of representation.

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Patrick White: Creating “a Race Possessed with Understanding”

Driesen¹

2019

A Companion to World Literature

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Patrick White is Australia's only Nobel Prize‐winning novelist. He affirmed the central concern of his writing to be “the relationship between the blundering human being and God.” This concern having been born of an epiphanic experience, he felt obliged to communicate this to the world. He returned to his native Australia seeking a source of renewal after the carnage of World War II, which he felt had reduced Europe to the state of “an actual and spiritual graveyard.” Returning to writing with a new faith, he designed a literary strategy to counter the secular modern mindset that disdains the religious experience, invoking a “poetic” language and a network of images and symbols through which the experience of transcendence could be mediated to readers. His work resonated early with a world readership, though his countrymen were slower to respond. Today he remains an iconic figure on the literary landscape of Australia as well as the world.

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Reading Corporeality in Patrick White’s Fiction

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues” to First-Year Students

Refining Contrapuntal Pedagogy: Reflections on Teaching Warsan Shire’s “Home” and W.H. Auden’s “Refugee Blues” to First-Year Students

Flaunting dissonance: The queering of narrative and gender boundaries in Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story

Patrick White: Creating “a Race Possessed with Understanding”

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