COLLOQUY Text Theory Critique

COLLOQUY text theory critique issue 20, december 2010 Editorial Committee: Editorial Board: Nathaniel Avery Bill Ashcroft Geoff Berry Andrew Benjamin David Blencowe Andriana Cavarero Conall Cash Joy Damousi Timothy Chandler Alex Düttmann Sam Cuff Jürgen Fohrmann Gene Flenady Sneja Gunew Rachel Funari Kevin Hart Ohad Kozminsky Susan K. Martin Eleonora Morelli Steven Muecke Isabella Ofner Paul Patton Stephen Palmer Georg Stanitzek Catherine Ryan Terry Threadgold Sophie Suelzle Advisory Board: Axel Fliethmann Brett Hutchins Alison Ross COLLOQUY text theory critique 20 (2010). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue20.pdf ISSN: 13259490 Issue 20, December 2010 Editorial 2 ARTICLES Not a Bush Flâneur? The Convergent Topographies of Recreational Bushwalking, Floristic Appreciation and Human Embodiment in the Southwest of Western Australia John Ryan 5 Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush: Gothic Landscapes in Bush Studies and Picnic at Hanging Rock Kathleen Steele 33 Yves Klein and Hysterical Marks of Authority Oliver Watts 57 Monstrous Fairytales: Towards an Écriture Queer Dallas J Baker 79 The Times They Are A-Changin’: The Passage of Time as an Agent of Change in Zack Snyder’s Film Adaptation of Watchmen Daniel Wood 104 The Hearing Trumpet: Leonora Carrington’s Feminist Magical Realism Gabriel García Ochoa 121 POETRY Blood John Ryan 145 BOOK REVIEWS Simon During. Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modernity. London: Routledge, 2010. Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley, UK: Zer0 Books, 2010. Conall Cash 148 COLLOQUY text theory critique 20 (2010). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue20/contents.pdf Editorial Issue 20 of Colloquy: text, theory, critique is a general issue, which pre- sents research on a diverse selection of themes. Topics of analysis include magic realism, bushwalking, the modernist avant-garde, and fairytales, with theoretical reference-points that range from adaptation theory to psycho- analysis, queer theory to the Australian gothic. The issue is completed by a number of book reviews and a poem by John Ryan. The editors wish to thank the many referees who made this issue possible. A brief overview of the articles in this issue reveals the richness of cur- rent postgraduate research in literary and cultural theory. John Ryan re- counts a history of bushwalking in the southwest of Western Australia, theorising the activity in the process. In contrast to the urban flâneur, Ryan argues that bushwalking does not privilege the ocular to the neglect of the other senses. Consequently, it offers a unique form of interaction with the landscape. Kathleen Steele looks at the uneasy representations of the Aus- tralian environment in Barbara Baynton's Bush Studies and Joan Lindsay’s ever-mysterious Picnic at Hanging Rock. Oliver Watts examines the hysterical invocations of authority that may be found in the work of Yves Klein. Dallas J Baker excavates the figure of the “monstrous queer” in some famil- iar fairytales and considers how such fairytales might be positively rewrit- ten. In particular, Wood focuses on the challenges presented by the two decades it took for Watchmen to reach the screen. In an essay on Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet, Gabriel García Ochoa argues that the text constitutes an early example of feminist magic realism. The next issue of Colloquy will contain proceedings of the conference COLLOQUY text theory critique 20 (2010). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue20/editorial20.pdf ░ Editorial 3 Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe as well as a general section. Finally, Daniel Wood examines the strategies of adaptation that are employed by Zack Snyder in his film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel Watchmen. Colloquy is presently seeking unsolicited submissions for future is- sues. Academic articles and review articles (both of which are fully refereed in a double-blind process), book reviews, translations, opinion essays and creative writing will be considered. Articles should relate to literary or cultural theory (pure or applied) and present research in the fields of literature, critical theory, cultural studies, film and television studies, translation theory, or theatre studies. The submission deadline for our next issue, which will be published in June 2011, is 18 February 2011. Prospective authors should note that from Issue 21 onwards, Colloquy will be changing its style guide to that of The Chicago Manual of Style, with endnotes and Australian spelling. Further details concerning this change will be made available on our webpage. THE EDITORS G E N E R A L A R T I C L E S Not a Bush Flâneur? The Convergent Topographies of Recreational Bushwalking, Floristic Appreciation and Human Embodiment in the Southwest of Western Australia John Ryan The bushwalker may justly claim that this pastime is one of the very few that develops both the mind and the body. It takes him far away from the hustle and bustle of the modern city and he may tread in places where no man has trod before. He learns to appreciate the strange, peaceful charm of the bush, and realises that man and his civilisation form only a small part of a wonderful creation. – The Federation of Australian Bushwalking Clubs (FABC) (1939)1 Bushwalkers of the Fitzgerald River National Park, I (Photo by J. Ryan) COLLOQUY text theory critique 20 (2010). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue20/ryan.pdf 6 John Ryan ░ The Botanising Stroll: Humans Embracing the Bush Since the Romantic era in Europe, walking has shifted from an obligatory activity tied to livelihood, through mobility, to a recreational pursuit of life 2 quality, engaging the landscape on foot. In the above quotation from the FABC, one of the earliest confederations of independent bushwalking or- ganisations in Australia, three elements make it germane: the bushwalker, the bush itself and the appreciation of the bush. As a therapeutic get-away from the city, bushwalking is amenable to “the mind and the body” and remedies the effects of urban stressors like “hustle and bustle.” Through walking, the urban dweller assumes the persona of an early European ex- plorer − say John Eyre or Alexander von Humboldt − who charted terra nul- lius “where no man has trod before,” or at least no European human. Most significantly, the recreational bushwalker, who would have typically been a male member of the upper-classes, experiences a transformation of values, realising that the bush looms largely beyond the horizon of city life, and its urban, suburban and rural spheres of organisation and commerce. Immersed in the landscape, the preoccupations of “civilisation” loom less largely, constituting “only a small part of a wonderful creation.” Invaria- bly, the walker, liberated from urban affinities of taste and dictums of be- haviour, some gestated in non-Australian contexts, “learns to appreciate the strange, peaceful charm of the bush.” In an era of post-Federation, nation-building and identity-making, an experience of bushwalking would be an illuminating foray into the character of the Australian landscape, one that is not discomfiting “weird melancholy,” as nineteenth-century poet and liter- 3 ary critic Marcus Clarke observed, but peaceful, though strange, charm. Hence, a walk would not merely be a pastime, but an invocation of nation- hood, at once personally rejuvenating, culturally instructive, and environ- mentally integrative. Though initially encountering alienation and foreign- ness, the walker‟s perceptual faculties become refined, and she or he learns, as Clarke did, to read the lingua of the bush: “He learns the lan- guage of the barren and uncouth and can read the hieroglyphs of haggard 4 gum-trees.” This article analyses the convergence of these three closely related, but often segregated, elements of bipedality, encapsulated in the passage from the FABC: the habitus of bushwalking, the bush through which the walker ambulates, and the appreciation of Australian landscape, especially its indigenous flora. Regionalised in the context of the Southwest corner of Western Australia, bushwalking will be considered through a case study of 5 the Bibbulmun Track, the region‟s premier contiguous walking route. Moreover, the “bush” under consideration will be a metonymy for the in- ░ Not a Bush Flâneur? 7 digenous flora of the Southwest region, an internationally recognised biodi- 6 versity hotspot with an unusual incidence of endemic plant species. Hu- man appreciation of flora through the experience of bushwalking is contex- tualised in the cultural phenomenon of wildflower tourism, usually most ac- tive during the late winter and spring months of August, September and Oc- 7 tober, or the Aboriginal seasons of Djilba and Kambarang. Expressing various degrees of human embodiment in the landscape, walking will be characterised as a mode of participation in the environment that collapses the Romantic ocular divide between the human appreciator and the pictur- esque scene. By forging a field for enhanced physical and multi-sensory awareness of plants, walking a landscape of floristic diversity complements 8 contemporary spectatorship models of wildflower tourism. Thus, there is noteworthy historical convergence between walking (in the bush rather than in the metropole), knowledge of plants (scientific or experiential), and a depth of sensory engagement with phenomena around and within us (cor- 9 poreality, or

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