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March 4, 2008
Robert Dixon argues in An agenda for our own literature for a strong version of internationalising Australian literature as a response to globalization and the decline of the cultural national project that underpinned the literary culture since the 1960s and 1970s. The most effective way to internationalise Australian literary studies and to develop strong and resilient connections is to embed it in existing intellectual networks. He says that:
the national literature - understood broadly as its texts, contexts and the modes of criticism we have developed and practised together - needs also to be exported, linked to and embedded in other readerships and intellectual agendas, especially those that define the mainstream of English literary studies as that field is constituted internationally in Europe and North America. We must find ways for Australian research to link with intellectual paradigms and research networks that are already strong internationally .... The question is how to transcend the boundaries of the nation so that Australian issues, texts and personnel can be embedded in international research agendas and networks that have as much to offer us as we have to offer them. This will not happen by linking with Australian studies centres abroad - even in the US - but by formulating and embedding links between Australian literature and mainstream work in English today.
There is nothing new here. As Dixon points out this as already been developed in cognate disciplines such as Australian feminist, cinema and cultural studies. Each of these is mindful of its national context but operates internationally. Hell, its even what I'm doing with my photography by linking it up to the Situationists.
History is important. Dixon says that:
In reality the national literature we have worked so hard to bring into visibility always was embedded in a series of wider contexts or horizons of explanation that we were not always able to recognise, and that now demand our attention. It has always been more cosmopolitan than we allowed, not least in the influence on Australian writers of literatures in languages other than English. Having fought and largely won the battle to mark out what is distinctively national about the national culture, we may rediscover the extent to which it was formed through its relations to other cultures in time and space.
Fair enough. What this indicates the deep hold Herder's conception of an organic culture had on the Australian literary tradition.
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Gary,
Dixon is for a transnational literary history, literary critique and literary practice. There are some significant moves afoot in the Australian literary Studies field, talked about in terms of the new empiricism and e-Research, where history is practiced through quantifying data about all (as opposed to literary) fiction and all print text; reading publics; histories of production and publication; and what has been called distant-reading.
Overall research in Aust Lit is moving more into analysing and explaining material histories of the production, circulation and consumption of print, rather than critique.
These new directions are on one level responses to research funding pressures and to the opportunities provided by digital technological innovation. On the other hand the exhaustion of, or even the disappearance of Liberalism as chief antagonist for, critical (Literary) theory (as your post on Mark Davis' essay makes clear), has opened a space into which these new empiricist research projects have entered.
I'm ambivalent about the almost celebratory enthusiasm which runs through the transnational-ism of this research programme. So, something like the Situ detournement and derive you pratice with image translated to the literary field would be a model I'd feel less angsty about. Which is probable why I'm drawn more to grunge-lit than other forms.