Writing Cultures Seminar Series 2009

An interdisciplinary working paper series incorporating work from creative writing, film, television and literary studies, law and modern languages.

All welcome and encouraged to attend - RSVP to Scott Brewer to attend the seminars.

Small worlds: writing, community and coterie

Seminar presented by Dr Keri Glastonbury

Date:               Monday 22 June
Location:         W301A
Time:               2-3.30pm

In his book Gangland: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism (Sydney: Allen &
Unwin, 1997) Mark Davis outlined the increasing nepotism of the Australian literary
establishment along generational lines. Post-Gangland, ‘coterie’ has become a dirty
word. But how does community/coterie operate for young and emerging writers,
beyond the bland and ubiquitous ‘new writing’ moniker? In what ways does ‘insider
trading’ continue to play a vital part in communities of writing and reading,
considering the dissolving boundaries between writing, publishing, networking and
socialising?

In a climate where niche publishing is considered the way of the future and small
communities of likeminded writers and readers are connecting along transnational
lines, this paper will consider the impact of new technologies (such as
Web2Pod/Print on Demand) and other DIY publishing and distribution models on
contemporary Australian writing cultures.

All Welcome! Please RSVP to Scott Brewer, scott.brewer@studentmail.newcastle.edu.au
to attend the seminar or receive a copy of the paper.

A goodly sample: exemplarity, rhetoric and female gallows confessions

Seminar presented by Dr Ros Smith

Monday 18 May

This paper examines a body of female complaints within gallows confessions that
were widely circulated as broadside black letter ballads in the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. These complaints offer a model of female lyric
subjectivity – visceral, emotional and concerned with the practices of everyday life –
that is surprisingly unfamiliar in a critical field that privileges early modern women’s
production of their own authority. Although female complaints of this kind were
widely circulated in the period, their influence upon women’s writing has been
obscured: both by early modern women’s textual practice in other courtly cultural
forms and, until recently, by the critical focus on those elite forms by scholars of
early modern women’s writing. This paper is interested in the ways in which the
female lyric subjects of gallows confession, less securely linked to early modern
women’s historical bodies than other forms of women’s writing in the period, might
function as exemplars of a very different kind of early modern woman writer: one
familiar to her contemporaries, but misrecognised by critics who privilege elite forms
of early modern women’s textual and political agency.

The paper first explores the ways in which current models of exemplarity, with
investments in both a collective sense of the past and individual interpretation in the
present, might be applied to this group of non-elite texts. Exemplarity in gallows
confessions can be surprisingly volatile, detached from institutional orthodoxy and
exploiting interpretative instability to the point that guilt can become innocence and
condemnation affirmation. These texts challenge current analyses of exemplarity
linked to elite male-authored texts, in which examples direct the imitative reader to
public action under the aegis of humanism, and figure both the static authority of
the past and the problematic uncertainty surrounding its interpretation in the
present. In contrast, these female gallows confessions offer a model of exemplarity
which is already destabilised, where the authority of the past is radically open to
question, affirming the individual’s use of interpretative instability for their own
ends. The way exemplarity is figured in the lyric subjects of gallows confession
reinforces recent reformulations of early modern understandings of rhetoric not as a
rule-bound practical art, but as one reflexive to its own historical situation and able
to characterize, in Daniel Gross’s terms, “how things might be otherwise”. If these
stories act as warnings – against the thrall of powerful women or the dishonesty of
men – they equally act as an unlikely source of possibility for the textual generation
of good character. The rhetorical possibilities for the female subject suggested by
these texts open up the question of whether their prosopopoeic models themselves
operated as examples to historical women writers in the period. Until recently, it has
been assumed that such popular texts functioned in ideologically transparent ways,
much like the rhetorical figure of the example, and as such they have been divorced
from the more complex elite texts that largely make up the canon of early modern
women’s writing. But this paper argues that these texts draw on a range of
precedents, legal, rhetorical and spiritual, that might form a complex and
illuminating “rhetoric of the possible” for the early modern woman writer.

Reading Bale reading Askew: contested collaboration in The Examinations

Seminar presented by Dr Patricia Pender

Monday 4 May

From her provocative public reading of the Bible in Lincoln cathedral to her eventual
execution as a heretic in 1546, Anne Askew’s Examinations bear witness to the
pivotal role that reading played in religious debates of the English Reformation. In
defiance of the Act of the Six Articles, Askew maintained the Protestant position on
the sacrament, affirming that, rather than being the actual body of Christ, the bread
“is onlye a sygne or sacrament” and “but a remembraunce of hys death.” In
maintaining her right to interpret the sacrament symbolically, in submitting to
torture rather than offering the recantation demanded of her, and in recording her
own spirited testimony of her trials, Askew herself became a powerful sign of the
religious battles being waged between English Catholics and Protestant Reformers in
the last years of Henry VIII’s reign. Askew’s willingness to defend and die for her
beliefs has made her an important figure for feminist literary history. However, her
recovery in the twentieth century has also been attended by concern about the
extent to which her text has been obscured by the work of male editors. Recent
scholarship has seen Askew’s text as overwhelmed, undermined, and even occluded
by her editors, most notably by her Reformation contemporary, John Bale, who
interspersed Askew’s text with his own voluminous “elucydacyons.” This paper will
explore the complex network of interpretation and framing which informs the
Examinations by focusing on three acts of reading as editing: the first is Askew’s
selective reading of the Scripture, which she uses to confound her Catholic
interrogators, the second is Bale’s strategic “elucydacyon” of Askew, which he uses
to position her in a tradition of Protestant dissent, and third are contemporary
critical paradigms which tend to mourn Askew as the victim of masculinist literary
tradition but which might also reassess her as a sophisticated reader and rhetorical
agent in her own right. Attention to the “interpretive struggle” evident in Bale’s
editions of Askew can help us extend our understanding both of early modern
editorial practice and role that gender played, and continues to play, in these
“contested collaborations.”