Volume 60, Issue 2

In recent years, a number of ‘postcolonial’ readings of John Gay’s Polly have appeared that treat the play as an anti-colonial text. The present essay argues that while colonial practices and ‘colonial discourse’ are satirised on a surface level, the text is less radical than it is sometimes taken to be. Its criticism has to be contextualised in Gay’s multi-levelled genre parody, particularly with regard to the pastoral tradition. Furthermore, Polly does not present Macheath as a race-conscious rebel; and finally, both plotstructure and ending undercut an anti-colonial reading.

This article construes proper names in Lolita as ciphers. Nabokov employs them to serve specific narrative purposes, so that especially the name “Lolita” can be held responsible for structuring all relevant semantic aspects of the novel. This comprises basic phonological and morphological processes up to the general meaning and purport structure of the whole text. I will outline Nabokov’s basic strategies of presenting his fictional world, highlight the purposes of names used as narrative ciphers and show how these generate the archetypal, mythological as well as satirical impact of the novel.

Absent mothers are striking features in Tim Winton’s novels, whether induced by death, circumstance or their own will. Motherhood is inextricably linked with trauma and suffering, either on the side of the mothers themselves, their husbands or their children. In this paper I will explain how absence and motherhood together function as metaphors for traumatic displacement and contribute to a redefinition of cultural, national and individual boundaries, while also illuminating problematic gender relations in Australia and their cultural representations. The focus is on a close-text analysis of The Riders (1994) while Winton’s other novels will be used to contextualise and strengthen the points made in this paper.

On 13 September 1994, a loose collective of Downtown poets known as the Unbearables lined up on the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian walkway, all the way from Manhattan to Brooklyn. During rush hour, they simultaneously ranted erotic poems in six-minute loops, so that, at least theoretically, “a few words from each reader would have reached each pedestrian’s ear, and the whole string of phrases would add up to a single ‘stochastic’ poem, a different version for each and every passerby” (Bey 1994, n.p.). The Unbearables’ thirty-minute performance was repeated in six consecutive years with only minor variations. The current article reconstructs the annual Brooklyn Bridge readings on the basis of previously unpublished sources that include personal interviews with the Unbearables and archival material from New York University’s Fales Library Downtown Collection and the SUNY of Buffalo Poetry Collection. On the basis of this reconstruction, the article analyzes the event as a poetic implementation of anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey’s theories on the Temporary Autonomous Zone, Poetic Terrorism and Artistic Disappearance .

In light of the fact that trans-disciplinary research on narrative journalism in cyberspace is theoretically underdeveloped, this paper explores new theoretical venues for a critical narratology based on an integration of three recent approaches in the field of narrative theory: trans-generic, intra-media, and trans-cultural narrative theory. The author discusses each of the three approaches in relation to online narrative journalism and assesses the potential of a recombinant trans-generic/intra-media/trans-cultural narrative theory in terms of new portals of dialogue by using the example of Mark Bowden’s online literary reportage The Desert One Debacle . The author of this paper argues that a re-thinking of online narrative journalism as a fertile breeding ground for narratological analysis not only allows for the necessary analysis of the intricate relationship between language and power and the manifold ways in which this relationship plays out in narrative discourse, but, more importantly, opens up the possibility for the critique of power under late capitalism. A twenty-first century narratology suited to adequately assess narrative journalism in cyberspace must acknowledge that information cannot be reduced to either form or matter, but must be treated rather as ‘matter-inform,’ thus integrating questions of matter, form, and interpretation.