Lyn McCredden | Deakin University (original) (raw)
Books by Lyn McCredden
Patrick White Centenary: Legacy of a Prodigal Son, 2014
Published as chp. 3, Patrick White Centenary: Legacy of a Prodigal Son, eds. Bill Ashcroft and Cy... more Published as chp. 3, Patrick White Centenary: Legacy of a Prodigal Son, eds. Bill Ashcroft and Cynthia van den Dreisen, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014.
Appears in Cultural seeds : essays on the work of Nick Cave, eds Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalzie... more Appears in Cultural seeds : essays on the work of Nick Cave, eds Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalziell, 2009.
This essay argues that the fiction of Tim Winton offers far more than mere celebration of Austral... more This essay argues that the fiction of Tim Winton offers far more than mere celebration of Australian place and white settler belonging. In an examination of Cloudstreet, Dirt Music, Eyrie and the memoir Island Home, the essay reveals a complex, unsettled, processual ontology of place. Winton emerges as the poet of non-belonging who dreams of, and seeks imaginative form for, the possibility of belonging, for Indigenous and non-Indigenous, working class and class traveller Australians. The essay is informed by Judith Butler's ontological theories of becoming, particularly in her volume Precarious Life.
A selection of essays on key Australian Women Poets: Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Ania Wawicz, Do... more A selection of essays on key Australian Women Poets: Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Ania Wawicz, Dorothy Porter, Dorothy Hewett
An international collection of critical essays on the fiction of Tim Winton. Essays by Bill Ashcr... more An international collection of critical essays on the fiction of Tim Winton. Essays by Bill Ashcroft, Fiona Morrison, Nick Birns, Pers Henningsgaard, Nathanael O'Reilly, Hannah Schuerholz, Bridget Rooney, Sissy Helff, Tanya Dalziell, Hou Fei, Michael Griffiths, Brigit Grogan, and Lyn McCredden.
Papers by Lyn McCredden
Journal for the Academic Study of Religion
What role can the imagination and literary language play in understanding ‘the sacred’, specifica... more What role can the imagination and literary language play in understanding ‘the sacred’, specifically theologies of incarnation? Australian novelist Patrick White’s Voss is read, in this article, as a testing ground for the ways in which human imagination can nurture incarnational longings and beliefs; but also for registering the limits of human language confronting what can be experienced semper processus. That is, this article argues that knowledge of sacredness and the incarnational, diversely intuited in many different forms and practices—Indigenous, European, Romantic, and in the land—can be approached in literary works, but that grasping a key expression of the sacred, incarnation, will always be an agonistic, stumbling, partial human process. The figure of Voss, lonely, self-absorbed, foreign, driven by will, intends to map the country, but this novel unravels human arrogance, undoing all its characters as they reach in their own ways towards incarnational truths.
The fiction of Australian author Tim Winton is read widely in Australia and China, as well as the... more The fiction of Australian author Tim Winton is read widely in Australia and China, as well as the U.K. and the U.S.A. However, critics seem to differ as to whether his work should be considered as literary, or whether it is popular. Although Winton's work has received many prizes, including the prestigious Australian Literary prize, the Miles Franklin award, four times, some critics 'worry' about Winton's popular appeal: his use of vernacular, his being read by a wide audience of all ages, his deployment of archetypal (stereotypical?) Australian beach settings, his often nostalgic tone. The argument of this essay is that the categories of literary and popular need vast revision. They are not static categories, and in the twenty-first century need to be reassessed in the light of global reading and entertainment trends and readerships. Winton's work is an excellent test case, as his works constantly play with and flout any rigid definition of 'literary' and 'popular'.
Poetry Review, Mar 1, 1999
Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature, 2017
As scholars, critics, reviewers and students of Australian literature, what are our values and ou... more As scholars, critics, reviewers and students of Australian literature, what are our values and our impact? Does what we research and write make any difference, make anything happen, anywhere? That is what the funders of our discipline are asking, but also what we need to ask of ourselves. This is not going to be a self-aggrandizing article, nor a nihilistic, hands-thrownup kind of essay-Whence the Humanities? Whence Literary Studies? Whence literature?although there may be something of that along the way. The most recent, 2018 round of Australian Research Council (ARC) grants is one arguably gloomy indicator that Literary Studies and its sister disciplines of Cultural Studies and Creative Writing are not doing well, and not being seen, in the national fields of research. Of course Literary Studies may have migrated into interdisciplinary locations, and is in now 'in competition' with other language disciplines, so is it becoming almost invisible on ARC platforms? This paper, generously given the mantle of the 2016 Dorothy Green Lecture in its first iteration, explores authority and the making of meaning in Literary Studies as interlocking questions. However, for many within the discipline and beyond, even the notion of meaning is under fire. This paper will defend the categories of value and of meaning-making in the Humanities, and ask where Literary Studies might be going. To do this I want first of all to set up a workable, if fluid definition of meaning, one which is appropriate for Literary Studies as well as for other current writing and critical practices, embracing the notion of '"meaning' as it moves between semantics and the effects of language, aesthetic and ideological. Meaning will be considered not as truth, but as interpretive, persuasive power and authority, in relation to Literary Studies. We might start with a basic, working definition: …the meaning and interpretation of words, signs, and sentence structure [is how we] largely determine our reading comprehension, how we understand others, and even what decisions we make as a result of our interpretations. Semantics can also refer to the branch of study within linguistics that deals with language and how we understand meaning. This has been a particularly interesting field for philosophers as they debate meaning: how we build meaning, how we share meaning with others, and how meaning changes over time. (Gentry online). The interdisciplinary focus of this kind of working definition of meaning and meaning-making has been important not just for Literary Studies, but across most Humanities disciplines. An added complication for the discipline of Literary Studies and a great deal of Cultural Studies and Creative Writing is that meaning is often what writers, perhaps especially experimental writers, as well as some critics, seek to eschew, challenging and subverting any peremptory claim to meaning, let alone truth. Critic Ed Wright's 2015 review of Michael Farrell's poetry volume Cocky's Joy in the Sydney Review of Books is helpful, for instance, in outlining this subversive end of the meaning-making spectrum. He writes:
Journal for the academic study of religion, May 10, 2022
What role can the imagination and literary language play in understanding ‘the sacred’, specifica... more What role can the imagination and literary language play in understanding ‘the sacred’, specifically theologies of incarnation? Australian novelist Patrick White’s Voss is read, in this article, as a testing ground for the ways in which human imagination can nurture incarnational longings and beliefs; but also for registering the limits of human language confronting what can be experienced semper processus. That is, this article argues that knowledge of sacredness and the incarnational, diversely intuited in many different forms and practices—Indigenous, European, Romantic, and in the land—can be approached in literary works, but that grasping a key expression of the sacred, incarnation, will always be an agonistic, stumbling, partial human process. The figure of Voss, lonely, self-absorbed, foreign, driven by will, intends to map the country, but this novel unravels human arrogance, undoing all its characters as they reach in their own ways towards incarnational truths.
Language and Semiotic Studies
The fiction of Australian author Tim Winton is read widely in Australia and China, as well as the... more The fiction of Australian author Tim Winton is read widely in Australia and China, as well as the U.K. and the U.S.A. However, critics seem to differ as to whether his work should be considered as literary, or whether it is popular. Although Winton's work has received many prizes, including the prestigious Australian Literary prize, the Miles Franklin award, four times, some critics 'worry' about Winton's popular appeal: his use of vernacular, his being read by a wide audience of all ages, his deployment of archetypal (stereotypical?) Australian beach settings, his often nostalgic tone. The argument of this essay is that the categories of literary and popular need vast revision. They are not static categories, and in the twenty-first century need to be reassessed in the light of global reading and entertainment trends and readerships. Winton's work is an excellent test case, as his works constantly play with and flout any rigid definition of 'literary' and 'popular'.
Patrick White Centenary: Legacy of a Prodigal Son, 2014
Published as chp. 3, Patrick White Centenary: Legacy of a Prodigal Son, eds. Bill Ashcroft and Cy... more Published as chp. 3, Patrick White Centenary: Legacy of a Prodigal Son, eds. Bill Ashcroft and Cynthia van den Dreisen, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014.
Appears in Cultural seeds : essays on the work of Nick Cave, eds Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalzie... more Appears in Cultural seeds : essays on the work of Nick Cave, eds Karen Welberry and Tanya Dalziell, 2009.
This essay argues that the fiction of Tim Winton offers far more than mere celebration of Austral... more This essay argues that the fiction of Tim Winton offers far more than mere celebration of Australian place and white settler belonging. In an examination of Cloudstreet, Dirt Music, Eyrie and the memoir Island Home, the essay reveals a complex, unsettled, processual ontology of place. Winton emerges as the poet of non-belonging who dreams of, and seeks imaginative form for, the possibility of belonging, for Indigenous and non-Indigenous, working class and class traveller Australians. The essay is informed by Judith Butler's ontological theories of becoming, particularly in her volume Precarious Life.
A selection of essays on key Australian Women Poets: Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Ania Wawicz, Do... more A selection of essays on key Australian Women Poets: Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Ania Wawicz, Dorothy Porter, Dorothy Hewett
An international collection of critical essays on the fiction of Tim Winton. Essays by Bill Ashcr... more An international collection of critical essays on the fiction of Tim Winton. Essays by Bill Ashcroft, Fiona Morrison, Nick Birns, Pers Henningsgaard, Nathanael O'Reilly, Hannah Schuerholz, Bridget Rooney, Sissy Helff, Tanya Dalziell, Hou Fei, Michael Griffiths, Brigit Grogan, and Lyn McCredden.
Journal for the Academic Study of Religion
What role can the imagination and literary language play in understanding ‘the sacred’, specifica... more What role can the imagination and literary language play in understanding ‘the sacred’, specifically theologies of incarnation? Australian novelist Patrick White’s Voss is read, in this article, as a testing ground for the ways in which human imagination can nurture incarnational longings and beliefs; but also for registering the limits of human language confronting what can be experienced semper processus. That is, this article argues that knowledge of sacredness and the incarnational, diversely intuited in many different forms and practices—Indigenous, European, Romantic, and in the land—can be approached in literary works, but that grasping a key expression of the sacred, incarnation, will always be an agonistic, stumbling, partial human process. The figure of Voss, lonely, self-absorbed, foreign, driven by will, intends to map the country, but this novel unravels human arrogance, undoing all its characters as they reach in their own ways towards incarnational truths.
The fiction of Australian author Tim Winton is read widely in Australia and China, as well as the... more The fiction of Australian author Tim Winton is read widely in Australia and China, as well as the U.K. and the U.S.A. However, critics seem to differ as to whether his work should be considered as literary, or whether it is popular. Although Winton's work has received many prizes, including the prestigious Australian Literary prize, the Miles Franklin award, four times, some critics 'worry' about Winton's popular appeal: his use of vernacular, his being read by a wide audience of all ages, his deployment of archetypal (stereotypical?) Australian beach settings, his often nostalgic tone. The argument of this essay is that the categories of literary and popular need vast revision. They are not static categories, and in the twenty-first century need to be reassessed in the light of global reading and entertainment trends and readerships. Winton's work is an excellent test case, as his works constantly play with and flout any rigid definition of 'literary' and 'popular'.
Poetry Review, Mar 1, 1999
Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature, 2017
As scholars, critics, reviewers and students of Australian literature, what are our values and ou... more As scholars, critics, reviewers and students of Australian literature, what are our values and our impact? Does what we research and write make any difference, make anything happen, anywhere? That is what the funders of our discipline are asking, but also what we need to ask of ourselves. This is not going to be a self-aggrandizing article, nor a nihilistic, hands-thrownup kind of essay-Whence the Humanities? Whence Literary Studies? Whence literature?although there may be something of that along the way. The most recent, 2018 round of Australian Research Council (ARC) grants is one arguably gloomy indicator that Literary Studies and its sister disciplines of Cultural Studies and Creative Writing are not doing well, and not being seen, in the national fields of research. Of course Literary Studies may have migrated into interdisciplinary locations, and is in now 'in competition' with other language disciplines, so is it becoming almost invisible on ARC platforms? This paper, generously given the mantle of the 2016 Dorothy Green Lecture in its first iteration, explores authority and the making of meaning in Literary Studies as interlocking questions. However, for many within the discipline and beyond, even the notion of meaning is under fire. This paper will defend the categories of value and of meaning-making in the Humanities, and ask where Literary Studies might be going. To do this I want first of all to set up a workable, if fluid definition of meaning, one which is appropriate for Literary Studies as well as for other current writing and critical practices, embracing the notion of '"meaning' as it moves between semantics and the effects of language, aesthetic and ideological. Meaning will be considered not as truth, but as interpretive, persuasive power and authority, in relation to Literary Studies. We might start with a basic, working definition: …the meaning and interpretation of words, signs, and sentence structure [is how we] largely determine our reading comprehension, how we understand others, and even what decisions we make as a result of our interpretations. Semantics can also refer to the branch of study within linguistics that deals with language and how we understand meaning. This has been a particularly interesting field for philosophers as they debate meaning: how we build meaning, how we share meaning with others, and how meaning changes over time. (Gentry online). The interdisciplinary focus of this kind of working definition of meaning and meaning-making has been important not just for Literary Studies, but across most Humanities disciplines. An added complication for the discipline of Literary Studies and a great deal of Cultural Studies and Creative Writing is that meaning is often what writers, perhaps especially experimental writers, as well as some critics, seek to eschew, challenging and subverting any peremptory claim to meaning, let alone truth. Critic Ed Wright's 2015 review of Michael Farrell's poetry volume Cocky's Joy in the Sydney Review of Books is helpful, for instance, in outlining this subversive end of the meaning-making spectrum. He writes:
Journal for the academic study of religion, May 10, 2022
What role can the imagination and literary language play in understanding ‘the sacred’, specifica... more What role can the imagination and literary language play in understanding ‘the sacred’, specifically theologies of incarnation? Australian novelist Patrick White’s Voss is read, in this article, as a testing ground for the ways in which human imagination can nurture incarnational longings and beliefs; but also for registering the limits of human language confronting what can be experienced semper processus. That is, this article argues that knowledge of sacredness and the incarnational, diversely intuited in many different forms and practices—Indigenous, European, Romantic, and in the land—can be approached in literary works, but that grasping a key expression of the sacred, incarnation, will always be an agonistic, stumbling, partial human process. The figure of Voss, lonely, self-absorbed, foreign, driven by will, intends to map the country, but this novel unravels human arrogance, undoing all its characters as they reach in their own ways towards incarnational truths.
Language and Semiotic Studies
The fiction of Australian author Tim Winton is read widely in Australia and China, as well as the... more The fiction of Australian author Tim Winton is read widely in Australia and China, as well as the U.K. and the U.S.A. However, critics seem to differ as to whether his work should be considered as literary, or whether it is popular. Although Winton's work has received many prizes, including the prestigious Australian Literary prize, the Miles Franklin award, four times, some critics 'worry' about Winton's popular appeal: his use of vernacular, his being read by a wide audience of all ages, his deployment of archetypal (stereotypical?) Australian beach settings, his often nostalgic tone. The argument of this essay is that the categories of literary and popular need vast revision. They are not static categories, and in the twenty-first century need to be reassessed in the light of global reading and entertainment trends and readerships. Winton's work is an excellent test case, as his works constantly play with and flout any rigid definition of 'literary' and 'popular'.
Literary Criticism, The Fiction of Tim Winton, Feb 8, 2017
Sydney University Press eBooks, Feb 1, 2017
This item is an extract from the book 'The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred', pu... more This item is an extract from the book 'The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred', published in 2016 by Sydney University Press.The book may be purchased from Sydney University Press at the following link: http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/sup/fictionoftimwinton.
Eureka street, 2014
I see your face across busy rooms, or in a street of strangers.Your face familiar and wry, eyebro... more I see your face across busy rooms, or in a street of strangers.Your face familiar and wry, eyebrows leaping with the furious farce of it all, your tears of wicked enjoyment...
Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature, 2013
The paper discusses the dichotomy between the 'metaphysical ascendancy' and postcolonial ... more The paper discusses the dichotomy between the 'metaphysical ascendancy' and postcolonial critical approaches, considering their implications for Aboriginal claims to sacred sites and referring to Mudrooroo's Doctor Wooreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World and Master of the Ghost Dreaming .
Le Simplegadi, Nov 1, 2017
Complicating the processes of belonging in place, for non-Indigenous Australians, is the growing ... more Complicating the processes of belonging in place, for non-Indigenous Australians, is the growing realization that they live in a huge, diverse land, a place in which they are not native. The fiction of popular Anglo-Saxon Australian novelist Tim Winton echoes the understanding of poet Judith Wright, for whom "two strands-the love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of the invasion-have become part of me. It is a haunted country" (Wright 1991: 30). This essay will explore Winton's novels in which there is a pervasive sense of unease and loss experienced by the central characters, in relation to place and land. Winton's characters-Queenie Cookson and her traumatic witnessing of the barbaric capture and flaying of whales; Fish Lamb's near-drowning in the sea, and Lu Fox's quest for refuge in the wilderness, prophet-like, after the tragedy of his family's death-are all written with a haunting sense of white unsettlement and displacement, where such natural forces-the sea and its creatures, the land's distances and risks-confront and reform the would-be dominators.
In his 2005 essay 'Australia is not an Island' poet and critic John Mateer discusses some of Aust... more In his 2005 essay 'Australia is not an Island' poet and critic John Mateer discusses some of Australia's more parochial (and dangerous) ideas about itself. He expresses his desire to have Australia open up beyond the merely local, writing that this nation needs a: …new 'metaphoric' of travel and exchange… a rhetoric that reveals genuine histories and true geographical relationships, that we may open the borders of the Australian islands not only to Asia but also to all the other islands of the world. (Mateer 93) Mateer argues that Australia has in fact already begun opening up, as it becomes increasingly multicultural (perhaps in stops and starts), part of an Asia-Pacific archipelago rather than being merely an island. However, he writes further that: Many Australians of an Anglo-Celtic background, who are often now maligned in those intellectual, inner-city circles that emphasise the notion of cosmopolitanism and the politics of internationalism, display those other, older, classically 'insular' traits of conformity and caution in the presence of the strange. How could they not do so, having come originally from the British Isles, islands that at different times were raided by the Vikings, invaded by the Romans, menaced by the Germans, colonised by the English and dispersed to the Commonwealth? (91) Of course one could argue quite the reverse, that such a set of historical dispersions and invasions experienced-and perpetrated-by Anglo-Celts might have prompted quite the opposite kinds of traits too-more cultural fluidity, more awareness of the 'elsewhere' in the 'here'. In fact both kinds of consequences of such migratory history are present in the social and cultural configurations of 'Australia': that is, some Anglo-Celts can be quite cosmopolitan, and at the same time I would agree that some of those intellectual, inner-city circles can be quite closed. (Nothing like a gaggle of inner urban academics for insularity).
Abstract: there are many forms of memory in post-colonial Australia, and many kinds of haunting. ... more Abstract: there are many forms of memory in post-colonial Australia, and many kinds of haunting. This paper investigates the poetry of contemporary Indigenous poets Sam Wagan Watson and Tony Birch, and reads the script of the Federal Government’s February 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations, asking how and why the nation should be haunted – historically and imaginatively- into the future.
Le Simplegadi, 2017
Complicating the processes of belonging in place, for non-Indigenous Australians, is the growing ... more Complicating the processes of belonging in place, for non-Indigenous Australians, is the growing realization that they live in a huge, diverse land, a place in which they are not native. The fiction of popular Anglo-Saxon Australian novelist Tim Winton echoes the understanding of poet Judith Wright, for whom "two strands-the love of the land we have invaded and the guilt of the invasion-have become part of me. It is a haunted country" (Wright 1991: 30). This essay will explore Winton's novels in which there is a pervasive sense of unease and loss experienced by the central characters, in relation to place and land. Winton's characters-Queenie Cookson and her traumatic witnessing of the barbaric capture and flaying of whales; Fish Lamb's near-drowning in the sea, and Lu Fox's quest for refuge in the wilderness, prophet-like, after the tragedy of his family's death-are all written with a haunting sense of white unsettlement and displacement, where such natural forces-the sea and its creatures, the land's distances and risks-confront and reform the would-be dominators.
Journal of the association for the study of Australian literature, 2016
Tim Winton's fiction has divided critics. His writing has been characterised as nostalgic (Di... more Tim Winton's fiction has divided critics. His writing has been characterised as nostalgic (Dixon), as too Christian (Goldsworthy), as blokey, and even misogynist (Schurholz). He has been pilloried on the blog site Worst of Perth, with its 'Wintoning Project,' which calls for contributions of 'Australian or Western Australian schmaltz, in the style of our most famous literary son, master dispenser of literary cheese and fake WA nostalgia Tim Winton' (online). And he has won the top Australian literary prize, The Miles Franklin Award, four times (Shallows, 1984; Cloudstreet, 1992; Dirt Music, 2002; and Breath, 2009). Winton's oeuvre spans three decades. It remains highly recognisable in its use of Australian vernacular and its sun-filled, beachy Western Australian settings; but it has also taken some dramatic, dark and probingly self-questioning turns. While critics often look for common strands in an author's oeuvre, it is revealing to consider development...
The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature, 2020