COLLOQUY text theory critique issue 15, june 2008 General Issue plus Crisis of Memory Editorial Committee: Editorial Board: Geoff Berry Bill Ashcroft David Blencowe Andrew Benjamin Michael Fitzgerald Andriana Cavarero Rachel Funari Joy Damousi Rhiannyn Geeson Alex Düttmann Leah Gerber Jürgen Fohrmann Barbara Ghattas Sneja Gunew Rhonda Khatab Kevin Hart Adam Lodders Susan K. Martin Blair MacDonald Steven Muecke Barbara Mattar Paul Patton Eleonora Morelli Georg Stanitzek Anna Mostavaia Terry Threadgold Robert Savage Robert Stilwell Julia Vassilieva Advisory Board: Axel Fliethmann Rose Lucas Alison Ross COLLOQUY text theory critique 15 (2008). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue15.pdf ISSN: 13259490 Issue 15, June 2008 Editorial 4 ARTICLES “To use a metaphor at a time like this would be obscene:” a study of can- cer, poetry and metaphor Cathy Altmann 7 Burning Down the [Big] House: Sati in Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary Frances Botkin 36 Wounded Space: Law, Justice and Violence to the Land Jennifer Coralie 52 Seeing Stars: Reading Melancholy and Power at Madame Tussauds through the Lens of Hiroshi Sugimoto Elizabeth Howie 75 Concrete Containment in Late Capitalism, Mysticism, the Marquis de Sade, and Phenomenological Anthropology Apple Igrek 95 “Edging Back Into Awareness”; How Late it Was, How Late, Form, and the Utopian Demand Dougal McNeill 115 CRISIS OF MEMORY Traumatic Memory and Holocaust Testimony: Passing Judgement in Rep- resentations of Chaim Rumkowski Adam Brown 128 Recreating Postmemory? Children of Holocaust Survivors and the Jour- ney to Auschwitz Esther Jilovsky 145 Blurring the Boundaries: History, Memory and Imagination in the Works of W G Sebald Diane Molloy 163 COLLOQUY text theory critique 15 (2008). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue15/contents.pdf 2 Contents ░ REVIEW ARTICLE Santiago Zabala (ed.) Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo. Monteal & Kingston; London; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Ashley Woodward 178 TRANSLATION ‘‘To a man with a big nose”: a new translation Jorge Salavert Pinedo 198 ESSAYS The Great Inland Sea: reflections on the buddhadharma in the post- secular age. Martin Kovan 204 Kazantzakis’ Poor Man of God: Philosophy without Philosophy Nick Trakakis 221 BOOK REVIEWS Jennifer Loureide Biddle. Breasts, bodies, canvas: Central Desert art as experience. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007. Elizabeth Burns Coleman 259 Robert Crawford. But Wait, There’s More…: A History of Australian Adver- tising, 1900-2000. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008. Jay Daniel Thompson 267 William Echard. Neil Young and the Poetics of Energy. Bloomington: Indi- ana University Press, 2005. Andrew Padgett 270 Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writ-ings, 1910-1927, edited by Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. James Garrett 274 Mark Poster. Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Adam Lodders 277 Henry Reynolds. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resis-tance to the European Invasion of Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006. Louise Gray 283 ░ Contents 3 Alison Ross. The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007. Carlo Salzani 287 Tim Thorne. A Letter to Egon Kisch. Launceston: Cornford Press, 2007. David Blencowe 291 CREATIVE WRITING Three Poems Vivienne Glance 297 In a straw house by a blue stream: Chinese Poems Christopher Kelen 301 Light Pink Summer Susan McMichael 306 A Brew that is True Nicola Scholes 309 Editorial Issue 15 of Colloquy: text theory critique comes in a new format that we think presents the best of both worlds – it combines both general arti- cles and a themed section (albeit a short one, on this occasion). For the foreseeable future, this will be the format for Colloquy – twice a year, with a special theme each issue and space for general articles to boot. This change is made in response to demand and means that we offer post- graduate students from institutions both local and abroad the opportunity to submit their work in line with a Call for Papers or in regards to their own specific areas of research. As well as this Colloquy offers the possibility of publishing new translations (this issue contains a Spanish poem), review articles, book reviews, creative pieces, and opinion essays (another new section, with a focus this issue on matters of faith and/or speculative phi- losophy). We believe that this makes Colloquy a uniquely vibrant and valu- able tool for postgraduate and early career researcher publication. The themed section of Issue 15 draws from papers presented at the recent German Studies Association of Australia conference titled Erin- nerungskrise / Crisis of Memory. With an explosion of interest in the con- cept of memory (Erinnerung and Gedächtnis) in recent years, the three postgraduate papers published in this issue consider a range of new con- cepts including post Holocaust memory and traumatic memory, and their interplay with literature, history and the human experience. As always the editors want to thank the many referees who made this issue possible. COLLOQUY text theory critique 15 (2008). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue15/editorial15.pdf ░ Editorial 5 Issue 16, to appear in December 2008, will feature papers devoted to Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” and Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law,” with contributors having been invited to extend their analyses to in- clude the cognate works of such thinkers as Schmitt, Arendt, Agamben and others in the continental tradition. In keeping with the interdisciplinary char- acter of Colloquy, explicit applications of Benjamin's or Derrida's insights to literary and cultural production are also expected. This special issue will be guest edited by Carlo Salzani and Michael FitzGerald. Colloquy is presently seeking unsolicited submissions for this and fu- ture issues. We are also seeking submissions for Issue 17 that consider the theme “Alternative visions: philosophies of freedom in South Asian Dias- poric Writing.” Students of postcolonial studies should find this area of par- ticular interest, although as always Colloquy remains open to researchers from all areas of the humanities with a focus on critical inquiry and creative responses. This issue will be guest edited by Elin-Maria Evangelista, Isa- bella Ofner and Pooja Mittal. This issue will also feature select postgradu- ate papers from the Communications and Media Studies conference, to be held in August 2008, on International and Intercultural Communications in the Age of Digital Media. These papers will consider current understand- ings of globalization and the most pressing questions facing media and communications scholars today, including relations between the empirical and the theoretical in media cultures in action, what ideas we use to make sense of them, and whether or not disciplinarity is even still a workable idea. The submission deadline for Issue 17 is November 15, 2008. Aca- demic articles, review articles, book reviews, translations, opinion essays and creative writing will be considered. THE EDITORS A R T I C L E S “To use a metaphor at a time like this would be obscene:” a study of cancer, poetry and metaphor Cathy Altmann Introduction “Cancer is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems 1 unimaginable to aestheticize the disease.” Susan Sontag’s famous dictum may no longer be entirely true, given the proliferation of writing on cancer in 2 the late 20th century and beyond. But, almost thirty years after Sontag wrote, cancer itself is still scandalous, despite her prediction that greater medical understanding would remove the stigma of cancer. This paper will examine the role of metaphor in relation to the “scandal” of cancer. It will consider the impact of metaphors drawn from popular culture, biomedicine, alternative medicine, and the holistic health movement, before examining COLLOQUY text theory critique 15 (2008). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue15/altmann.pdf 8 Cathy Altmann ░ the unique role of poetic metaphor in the work of Australian poet Philip Hodgins. Metaphor, at its simplest, is figure of speech which unites two dispa- rate areas of human experience. It is far stronger than simile, because of the collision of one area with another: compare “her eyes are like the sea” with “her eyes are the sea.” The compression of metaphor gives it its punch. Philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that meta- phor is such a powerful form of communication because of its ability to 3 unite the abstract with the physical and visual. The immediacy of the vis- ual image makes it compelling. It appears incontrovertible, since it is easily visualised. Consider the metaphor “life is a journey.” While life is an ab- stract concept which we struggle to define, journey, on the other hand, is a part of our everyday experience. The power of the metaphor is its visual simplicity. The fact that this is an over-simplification has not prevented the metaphor from becoming so widely used it is a cliché. However, a metaphor is not merely a figure of speech. As Lakoff and Johnson have demonstrated in their study, Metaphors We Live By, meta- phors “provide the only ways to perceive and experience much of the 4 world.” So the metaphors we use matter. The metaphor “life is a journey” affects and reveals our concept of life, which affects the very way we ex- perience life. The metaphor also blinds us to the many ways life is not a journey. Metaphor, as the above analysis demonstrates, is a fiction which “has the power to redescribe reality,” to use philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s descrip- 5 tion. The reality of life is redescribed in terms of a journey. Ricoeur con- cludes that the “‘place’ of metaphor, its most intimate and ultimate abode, is neither the name, nor the sentence, nor even discourse, but the copula of 6 the verb to be.” Metaphor, which says both this “is like” and “is not” some- thing, acts out in microcosm the split between the sign and the signifier.