Exploring literary representations of ‘place’ from Melbourne’s inner north to the Mallee region
Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies and Associate Head of School (Research) for the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Dr Emily Potter had two new articles published last week.
Emily Potter and Kirsten Seale wrote ‘The worldly text and the production of more-than-literary place: Helen Garner’s “Monkey Grip” and Melbourne’s inner north’, published in Cultural Geographies on November 5th, 2019. The abstract is here, with the full text available through Sage journals.
In this article, Emily and Kirsten discuss the ways in which ‘literature about place is frequently conceived by writers and readers as a response to, or a reproduction of, place,’ and ‘how images and affects from Helen Garner’s 1977 novel, Monkey Grip, influence understandings and formations of place’ in the inner northern suburbs of Fitzroy and Carlton in Melbourne.
In the second article is written by Emily Potter and Brigid Magner (RMIT University), ‘Kurangk/Coorong atmospheres: Postcolonial stories and regional futures’, published in TEXT.
In this piece, Emily and Brigid explore the impact of ‘place-stories’ on environmental futures. Within it, they ‘consider(s) a critical methodology for assembling a literary history of the Kurangk/Coorong region of South Australia’. The authors explain their interest and context for this discussion in the opening paragraph:
This article argues that place-stories matter to environmental futures. In a context of colonisation and the related devastation to people and ecologies, this connection has a particular inflection. Colonisation proceeds not just through material forces and practices but through poetic means also, via the narratives told about a place and its more-than-human communities. Just what stories gain ground over others, and which ones are lost or sublimated, is a matter of power that literary texts are implicated in. For this reason, the literary history of a place is far from benign. We take up this argument in relation to the Kurangk/Coorong region of South Australia, where the Murray River meets the sea, and where environmental pressures and poetic histories coalesce. Here, we consider how a critical literary methodology might engage with this coalescence to offer alternative place-visions and, with these, potentially different futures for the region.
It is a fascinating piece, stemming from a wider project which explores the literary history of the Mallee region in northwest Victoria.
You can read the complete article here.
About the author
Dr Emily Potter is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, and Associate Head of School (Research) for the School of Communication and Creative Arts. Her research sits in an interdisciplinary space, focusing on the intersections of cultural production and environments. Her areas of expertise include literature and climate change, literature and place-making, the biopolitics of water and consumption, urban design and poetic practice, contemporary Australian literature, and postcolonial texts and environments.
Emily is the co-author of Plastic Water: The Social and Political Life of Bottled Water (with Gay Hawkins and Kane Race, MIT, 2015), and her monograph Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field of Settler Colonial Place is forthcoming with Intellect in late 2019. She has been a Chief Investigator on three ARC grants, including as an ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and in 2017 was awarded (with Fiona Miller and Eva Lovbrand) seed funding for “The Shadow Places Network: a collaboration to re-imagine and co-produce connections for justice in an era of climate change”, from the Seed Box Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, Sweden.
Find a list of the above publications and others by Emily Potter here.