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Papers by Greg Graham-Smith
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2020
The Twyborn Affair (1979) is generally regarded as Patrick White’s covert “coming out” novel, fol... more The Twyborn Affair (1979) is generally regarded as Patrick White’s covert “coming out” novel, followed by his frank “confession” in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). However, this article explores how even an earlier work such as The Aunt’s Story (1977/1948), from the Nobel laureate’s modernist phase, may be seen as a pre-text for the gay self, whereby the author stages incomplete representations of his own subaltern position in the characters he “becomes” in his writing. Through a series of textual feints, his persona is disseminated in the form of polyvalent alternative selves which belie any possibility for recuperation of a stable, authentic selfhood. White thereby refuses the univocal inscription of subjectivity upon which sexual hegemony is predicated. What I aim to do in this article is to extend the particularities of the novel’s writing strategies (found in the Jardin Exotique section, for example, which functions as a Foucauldian heterotopic space) into the pro...
Scrutiny2, 2018
We write with heavy hearts to celebrate and commemorate the life of our long-term colleague, Kare... more We write with heavy hearts to celebrate and commemorate the life of our long-term colleague, Karen Scherzinger, who passed away at her home from a brain tumour on 26 May 2019 at the age of 57 after a long and courageous battle and two operations. Karen is survived by her husband, Rainer Scherzinger, and three children, Rowan, Cait and Callum.
Myth & Symbol, 1993
The author argues that director Gary Marshall's film, Pretty Woman, like Shakespeare's ... more The author argues that director Gary Marshall's film, Pretty Woman, like Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, although drawing upon the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, actually subverts it. In the original myth, Galatea is created through the metamorphosis of the statue of feminine ideality which Pygmalion moulds. This myth embodies the stereotype of man as active creator and woman as passive adjunct to male fantasy. In Pretty Woman and Shakespeare's play, however, it is the woman who is the creator, re-moulding and re-educating her husband/lover towards a new, less truncated selfhood. Both Pretty Woman and The Winter's Tale also establish a dialectical relationship between art and life, between fantasy and reality, myth and anti-myth. These are shown, through a manipulation of the boundaries between them, to be, not mutually exclusive categories, but mutually defining and mutually enriching.
Scrutiny2, 2015
ABSTRACT In an examination of Wajdi Mouawad's play, Incendies (2003) and the 2010 film versio... more ABSTRACT In an examination of Wajdi Mouawad's play, Incendies (2003) and the 2010 film version of the play directed and scripted by Denis Villeneuve, this article explores the quest narrative as it underpins these texts, with particular reference to exile, trauma and reparation. The suggestive trope of “home” as this intersects with identity, and the threat to identity posed by war and suffering, as well as the palimpsestic construction and reconstruction of memory, and its ability (and inability) to palliate the traumatised “housing” of the body (in particular the maternal body of Nawal Marwan, the character who originates the theatrical and filmic chronotopes) is also investigated in relation to the reworking of the Oedipus myth that informs both play and film. Through the theoretical lens of Derridean and Lacanian poststructuralism and the imbrication of gender and trauma studies, the article interrogates the complex staging of traumatic re- enactment as manifested in the interstitial spaces between the theatrical and filmic texts.
Social Dynamics, 2012
This paper raises pressing issues regarding the present and future of the university. It is stron... more This paper raises pressing issues regarding the present and future of the university. It is strongly critical of worldwide corporatisation and the response of academics to what the authors consider to be a crisis or impasse. As a mark of capitalist ascendancy, the university as corporate has, it would seem, lost its soul and its autonomy. The focus on collegiality invokes the communitarian and independent spirit which has for centuries been the foundation of university ideals, but which is presently undermined by managerialism and its profit-driven motives. A crass utilitarianism appropriates and 'brands' academic values to retain pseudo-prestige, while impoverishing the sense of vocation without which collegiality is rendered an anachronism. In their last section, the authors propose a way forward, indicating that a revival of collegial governance is both possible and imperative.
Scrutiny2, 2012
Abstract Taking its cue from the photograph on the dust-jacket of the Picador hardback 2011 editi... more Abstract Taking its cue from the photograph on the dust-jacket of the Picador hardback 2011 edition of Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel, The stranger's child, this article aims to explore the maze as metaphor for the novel's complex meditation on sexuality and its imbrication with the instability of memory and the unstable narrative trope of concealment and revelation, elegy and erasure. The multicursal, as opposed to the unicursal, maze is one where choice, and therefore a wrong turn, is possible. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan relating to the interlocking force-field of loss, language, memory and desire (particularly as these are adumbrated in his Seminar XX: encore, on feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge, 1972-1973) the maze is investigated as a suggestive symbol for gayness as, paradoxically, the absent centre of Hollinghurst's text, one which imbues the novel with a particular vein of melancholy, where gay sexual choice is freighted with a perilous “false” turning and a seemingly unattainable centre, compelled into self-dissimulation and “fictiveness” under the pressure of hegemonic society.
Communicatio, 2008
Abstract Drawing on contemporary theorisation of the body and the ways in which the body is stage... more Abstract Drawing on contemporary theorisation of the body and the ways in which the body is staged/performed, this article will consider the received legal tradition of the letter of the law as univocal and bindingenacted through the body of evidence and due processand ...
Scrutiny2, 2004
ABSTRACT The title and introduction of this article draw on Keats's evocative line,... more ABSTRACT The title and introduction of this article draw on Keats's evocative line,half in love with easeful Death, taken from his Ode to a nightingale, a poem which is used as a point of entry for a discussion of the paradoxical contiguity between sex and death, Eros ...
The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2020
The Twyborn Affair (1979) is generally regarded as Patrick White’s covert “coming out” novel, fol... more The Twyborn Affair (1979) is generally regarded as Patrick White’s covert “coming out” novel, followed by his frank “confession” in his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass (1981). However, this article explores how even an earlier work such as The Aunt’s Story (1977/1948), from the Nobel laureate’s modernist phase, may be seen as a pre-text for the gay self, whereby the author stages incomplete representations of his own subaltern position in the characters he “becomes” in his writing. Through a series of textual feints, his persona is disseminated in the form of polyvalent alternative selves which belie any possibility for recuperation of a stable, authentic selfhood. White thereby refuses the univocal inscription of subjectivity upon which sexual hegemony is predicated. What I aim to do in this article is to extend the particularities of the novel’s writing strategies (found in the Jardin Exotique section, for example, which functions as a Foucauldian heterotopic space) into the pro...
Scrutiny2, 2018
We write with heavy hearts to celebrate and commemorate the life of our long-term colleague, Kare... more We write with heavy hearts to celebrate and commemorate the life of our long-term colleague, Karen Scherzinger, who passed away at her home from a brain tumour on 26 May 2019 at the age of 57 after a long and courageous battle and two operations. Karen is survived by her husband, Rainer Scherzinger, and three children, Rowan, Cait and Callum.
Myth & Symbol, 1993
The author argues that director Gary Marshall's film, Pretty Woman, like Shakespeare's ... more The author argues that director Gary Marshall's film, Pretty Woman, like Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, although drawing upon the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, actually subverts it. In the original myth, Galatea is created through the metamorphosis of the statue of feminine ideality which Pygmalion moulds. This myth embodies the stereotype of man as active creator and woman as passive adjunct to male fantasy. In Pretty Woman and Shakespeare's play, however, it is the woman who is the creator, re-moulding and re-educating her husband/lover towards a new, less truncated selfhood. Both Pretty Woman and The Winter's Tale also establish a dialectical relationship between art and life, between fantasy and reality, myth and anti-myth. These are shown, through a manipulation of the boundaries between them, to be, not mutually exclusive categories, but mutually defining and mutually enriching.
Scrutiny2, 2015
ABSTRACT In an examination of Wajdi Mouawad's play, Incendies (2003) and the 2010 film versio... more ABSTRACT In an examination of Wajdi Mouawad's play, Incendies (2003) and the 2010 film version of the play directed and scripted by Denis Villeneuve, this article explores the quest narrative as it underpins these texts, with particular reference to exile, trauma and reparation. The suggestive trope of “home” as this intersects with identity, and the threat to identity posed by war and suffering, as well as the palimpsestic construction and reconstruction of memory, and its ability (and inability) to palliate the traumatised “housing” of the body (in particular the maternal body of Nawal Marwan, the character who originates the theatrical and filmic chronotopes) is also investigated in relation to the reworking of the Oedipus myth that informs both play and film. Through the theoretical lens of Derridean and Lacanian poststructuralism and the imbrication of gender and trauma studies, the article interrogates the complex staging of traumatic re- enactment as manifested in the interstitial spaces between the theatrical and filmic texts.
Social Dynamics, 2012
This paper raises pressing issues regarding the present and future of the university. It is stron... more This paper raises pressing issues regarding the present and future of the university. It is strongly critical of worldwide corporatisation and the response of academics to what the authors consider to be a crisis or impasse. As a mark of capitalist ascendancy, the university as corporate has, it would seem, lost its soul and its autonomy. The focus on collegiality invokes the communitarian and independent spirit which has for centuries been the foundation of university ideals, but which is presently undermined by managerialism and its profit-driven motives. A crass utilitarianism appropriates and 'brands' academic values to retain pseudo-prestige, while impoverishing the sense of vocation without which collegiality is rendered an anachronism. In their last section, the authors propose a way forward, indicating that a revival of collegial governance is both possible and imperative.
Scrutiny2, 2012
Abstract Taking its cue from the photograph on the dust-jacket of the Picador hardback 2011 editi... more Abstract Taking its cue from the photograph on the dust-jacket of the Picador hardback 2011 edition of Alan Hollinghurst's latest novel, The stranger's child, this article aims to explore the maze as metaphor for the novel's complex meditation on sexuality and its imbrication with the instability of memory and the unstable narrative trope of concealment and revelation, elegy and erasure. The multicursal, as opposed to the unicursal, maze is one where choice, and therefore a wrong turn, is possible. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan relating to the interlocking force-field of loss, language, memory and desire (particularly as these are adumbrated in his Seminar XX: encore, on feminine sexuality, the limits of love and knowledge, 1972-1973) the maze is investigated as a suggestive symbol for gayness as, paradoxically, the absent centre of Hollinghurst's text, one which imbues the novel with a particular vein of melancholy, where gay sexual choice is freighted with a perilous “false” turning and a seemingly unattainable centre, compelled into self-dissimulation and “fictiveness” under the pressure of hegemonic society.
Communicatio, 2008
Abstract Drawing on contemporary theorisation of the body and the ways in which the body is stage... more Abstract Drawing on contemporary theorisation of the body and the ways in which the body is staged/performed, this article will consider the received legal tradition of the letter of the law as univocal and bindingenacted through the body of evidence and due processand ...
Scrutiny2, 2004
ABSTRACT The title and introduction of this article draw on Keats's evocative line,... more ABSTRACT The title and introduction of this article draw on Keats's evocative line,half in love with easeful Death, taken from his Ode to a nightingale, a poem which is used as a point of entry for a discussion of the paradoxical contiguity between sex and death, Eros ...