1 May – Seminar: Emmett Stinson on Gerald Murnane

The first installment of the 2019 Writing and Literature seminars will be held on Wednesday 1 May, from 1–2pm. You’re invited to join our first presenter, staff member Emmett Stinson, who will give a paper on Australian writer Gerald Murnane.

Gerald Murnane’s International Reception and Post-Digital Literary Culture

Abstract: Pascale Casanova has noted that literary cultures produce two kinds of writers: international writers, whose work tends toward the autonomous pole of literary production and is read by a cosmopolitan, educated audience, and national writers, whose work tends to be both popular and populist, but is often unrecognised by literary elites abroad. Gerald Murnane would seem to be an ‘international’ writer: his work has been extensively translated and published around the world; he has been considered a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature; and he has received extensive praise from well-known overseas literary authors, such as Teju Cole and Ben Lerner. This international praise has been accompanied by delayed recognition at home.

This paper examines how the seemingly distinct streams of ‘national’ and ‘international’ authors increasingly run together. Post-digital literary reception is always already transnational, and complicates these clear distinctions. This paper analyses the recent reception of Gerald Murnane’s work to examine how the status of the autonomous, international writer is affected by participation within these broader post-digital networks of literary culture.

When: Wednesday 1 May, 1–2 pm
Where: Deakin University, Burwood campus, room F2.009; Geelong campus, room IC1.108; Warrnambool campus, room A3.41.
RVSP: All welcome, but please RSVP to Alyson Miller: alyson.miller [at] deakin.edu.au

 

*Featured image by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash