AUSTRALIAN HUMANITIES REVIEW issue 47 2009 Edited by Monique Rooney and Russell Smith Australian Humanities Review Editors: Monique Rooney, The Australian National University Russell Smith, The Australian National University Consulting Editors: Lucy Frost, University of Tasmania Elizabeth McMahon, University of New South Wales Cassandra Pybus, University of Tasmania Editorial Advisors: Stuart Cunningham, Queensland University of Technology Guy Davidson, University of Wollongong Ken Gelder, University of Melbourne Andrew Hassam, Monash University Marilyn Lake, La Trobe University Sue Martin, La Trobe University Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, University of Sydney Libby Robin, The Australian National University Deborah Rose, The Australian National University Susan Sheridan, Flinders University Rosalind Smith, University of Newcastle Terry Threadgold, Cardiff University, Wales McKenzie Wark, Eugene Lang College, New York Terri-Ann White, University of Western Australia Adi Wimmer, University of Klagenfurt, Austria Australian Humanities Review is published by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, with the support of the School of Humanities at The Australian National University. Mailing address: Editors, Australian Humanities Review, School of Humanities, AD Hope Building #14, The Australian National University, ACT 0200, Australia. Email: [email protected] Website: www.australianhumanitiesreview.org Published by ANU E Press Email: [email protected] Website: http://epress.anu.edu.au © The Australian National University. This Publication is protected by copyright and may be used as permitted by the Copyright Act 1968 provided appropriate acknowledgment of the source is published. The illustrations and certain identified inclusions in the text are held under separate copyrights and may not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the respective copyright holders. Copyright in the individual contributions contained in this publication rests with the author of each contribution. Any requests for permission to copy this material should be directed to the publishers. The text has been supplied by the authors as attributed. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the publisher. Printed in Australia AHR Issue 47 (2009) ISSN 1835-8063 (PRINT), ISSN 1325-8338 (ONLINE) Table of Contents Editors’ Introduction . .1 Monique Rooney and Russell Smith Essays Grizzling about Facebook . 5 Meaghan Morris English, Autonomy, and the Republic of Letters . 23 Ken Gelder Introduction: The Art of the Real . 39 Keri Glastonbury and Rosalind Smith Extractive Realism . 43 Ross Gibson The Opera House of the West . 55 Cameron Muir The Perfect Electrometer: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Lover’s Discourse . 67 Patricia Pender The Ecological Humanities Introduction: Writing in the Anthropocene . 87 Deborah Rose Animots and the Alphabête in the Poetry of Francis Ponge . 89 Laurel Peacock Inventing Nature: Re-writing Time and Agency in a More-than- Human World . 99 Michelle Bastian ‘Plants That Perform For You’? From Aesthetics to Floraesthesis in the Southwest of Western Australia . 117 John C. Ryan Re-storying the World: Reviving the Language of Life . 141 Madronna Holden Touching Narratives . 159 Lorraine Shannon Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness? . 173 Kate Rigby Book Reviews Nathan Hollier reviews Russel Ward: Reflections on a Legend, a special issue of Journal of Australian Colonial History 10.2 (2008) edited by Frank Bongiorno and David Andrew Roberts… . 191 Deborah Madsen reviews Chinese in Australian Literature, 1888-1988 by Ouyang Yu . 197 Christine McPaul reviews Forgetting Aborigines by Chris Healy . 201 Chris Healy reviews The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World by Robert Kenny . 207 Editors’ Introduction MONIQUE ROONEY AND RUSSELL SMITH Welcome to our November 2009 issue of Australian Humanities Review. In our Target Essay ‘Grizzling about Facebook’, Meaghan Morris brilliantly and provocatively tackles the grievances and forebodings, often issuing from print journalism, about the impact of the online environment on everyday life, the future of sociability and possibilities for political change. As a response to what she calls ‘grizzling’—fretful or helpless responses to technological and cultural power shifts—Morris delves into the complex realities of online social interaction. While she reminds us of Facebook’s complicity in processes of commodification—its simultaneous promotion and limitation of consumer ‘choice’—she ultimately insists on the political effectivity of the ‘grizzling’ of Facebook users as exemplary of a new dynamics of collective action within what is essentially a corporately-owned and controlled social domain. The question of sociability is also central to Ken Gelder’s essay, ‘English, Autonomy, and the Republic of Letters’, which broaches the question of the future of literary studies in an age of competitive funding and disciplinary fragmentation. This essay situates current debates about literature’s identity, autonomy and political potential in the context of its disciplinary history and its roots in the petite monde of the seventeenth-century ‘republic of letters’. Gelder asks whether literary studies continues to be delimited by this historical antecedent, which orients it in secular, socially-progressive but fundamentally inward-looking ways; and whether its habitual defence of its autonomy not only ensures its marginality in contemporary models of knowledge production, but also continues to characterise its critical potential? We also present a selection of papers from The Art of the Real, a conference dedicated to Creative Non-Fiction held in Newcastle in May 2008. Introduced by Keri Glastonbury and Rosalind Smith, each of the three essays explores different questions about the representation of the ‘real’. Ross Gibson’s keynote ‘Extractive Realism’ explores the art of eliciting connective structures from seemingly random details, his conjunction of haiku and Lúkacs itself exemplary of the practice. Cameron Muir’s ‘The Opera House of the West’ takes the reader on a tour of the massive and neglected Burrendong Dam, in a meditation on 1 Australian Humanities Review - Issue 47 the environmental costs of nation-building, while Patricia Pender’s ‘The Perfect Electrometer’ reads Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals as uncannily exemplary of the rhetorical repertoires of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. The Ecological Humanities features a special issue on ‘Writing in the Anthropocene’. The term ‘Anthropocene’ was coined by Nobel laureate Paul J. Crutzen to designate the new geological epoch, following the Holocene and conventionally understood to begin with the invention of the steam engine in 1784, in which human activities begin to have a significant impact on the planet’s life-support systems. Each of the six essays in this section responds to Val Plumwood’s challenge to find new ways of writing in the Anthropocene that take us beyond anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. In the Book Reviews section, Deborah Madsen reviews Ouyang Yu’s Chinese in Australian Literature, 1888-1988; Nathan Hollier reviews a special issue of Journal of Australian Colonial History dedicated to historian Russell Ward and his enduring figure of the ‘Australian Legend’; Christine McPaul reviews Chris Healy’s Forgetting Aborigines while Healy himself reviews Robert Kenny’s The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World. 2 ESSAYS Grizzling about Facebook MEAGHAN MORRIS You’re all crazy. Every one of you. You just sit here, in your cosy little house, with your cold sodas and your Facebook pages, like it all matters. Like it’s even real. But it’s not! It’s all going to burn and you’re going to be nothing but bleached skulls. Don’t you get it? You’re dead! All of you are dead! (Riley in ‘Strange Things Happen’) Procrastinating one Sunday, I set aside a pile of print-outs from on-line media stories on the perils and inanities of Facebook and settled in for a serious read of the South China Morning Post (in hard copy, of course, with hot coffee on the side). You may need to know this great newspaper to appreciate my shock at finding therein a sententious editorial about Facebook (‘Facebook no substitute for real world contact’). While it is a Murdoch property, criticised at times for a willingness to accommodate the pressures of Beijing, the SCMP is still a hard news-focussed paper, full of serious analysis of events around the world: it does not feature frothy columnists, and celebrity wardrobe malfunctions rarely make the front page. Yet here, with no context beyond a slight story about phishing attacks on Facebook, was one of those loopy, furious moral blares that in recent years I have come to associate with Australian newspapers: ‘there is always superficiality to networking on the Web’, the writer opined. If Facebook ‘perhaps’ helps us keep in touch with friends in faraway places, ‘making new friends and maintaining old friendships requires effort, emotional commitment and contact in the real world. Facebook is no substitute for face time’. My print-out collection is full of attempts like this to adjudicate what is and isn’t real in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Many of these pieces must be written (I surmise) by stressed-out journalists with no more access than I have to lots of personal ‘face time’. As a Facebook user whose loved ones are often very far away, of course I disagree with the editorial’s premises; anyone