Christopher Conti | Western Sydney University (original) (raw)

Papers by Christopher Conti

Routledge eBooks, May 16, 2019

The actor who can't leave the stage - like the sales rep who lives in transit, the stenograph... more The actor who can't leave the stage - like the sales rep who lives in transit, the stenographer who throws himself on the mercy of the court, the chess master who fakes his own funeral, the judge who swears in witnesses to his dream of auto-execution or the student who steals the identities of excursionists to the Veste Oberhaus in Passau - is at the end of his rope. The personal catastrophes catalogued in the reports, notices, anecdotes, aphorisms and parables that make up Proofs, as in those of its model, Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, arose in the nature of things, as the final entry 'Pseudonym' remarks in a tribute to Bernhard

Southerly, 2009

Short stories

Papers on Language and Literature

ABSTRACT

The six months Joseph Heller flew B-52 bombing missions over Italy in 1944 provided him with the ... more The six months Joseph Heller flew B-52 bombing missions over Italy in 1944 provided him with the traumatic inspiration for a new satirical, an art that captured, in all its complexities and contradictions, the liberal world order centered on U.S. power that rose from the ruins of World War II (1939-1945). Discharged from the army, Heller returned to his Brooklyn, New York, birthplace near Coney Island (where he was born to Russian Jewish immigrants on May 1, 1923) to marry Shirley Held and apply under the GI Bill to the University of Southern California and later New York University. In 1949 he received his master of arts degree from Columbia University, where he had attended Lionel Trilling’s lectures on American literature, and he pursued further literary study as a Fulbright scholar at Oxford University. He was already a widely published short-story writer and father of two children when he took a teaching post at Pennsylvania State University from 1950 to 1952, before leaving academia to work in advertising and on the draft of his first novel. Nine years in the writing, Catch-22 (1961) became a publishing phenomenon that shaped Heller’s career, establishing his key themes of death, denial, and the irrationality of organized life under Cold War capitalism. Initially hailed as absurdist or black humorist, Heller’s blend of satire, caricature, and nonlinear narrative was later identified as an exemplary instance of postmodern fiction

In 1906 Fredrikke Nielsen, 69-year-old Norwegian actor and pioneer, travelled to Kristiania for t... more In 1906 Fredrikke Nielsen, 69-year-old Norwegian actor and pioneer, travelled to Kristiania for the state funeral of Henrik Ibsen. Half a century earlier, Nielsen had electrified National Theatre audiences at Bergen in the role of Hørdis in The Vikings at Helgoland, the first of a string of Ibsen heroines she was to play for the next 25 years before joining the Methodist assembly in the US to fight from the pulpit for the rights of women and single mothers. Taking her place in the ten thousand strong funeral procession, Nielsen laid a wreath and gave a short speech thanking Ibsen for the gift of all those great female stage roles. We can now thank Ibsen for giving us another. The female Dr Stockmann currently treading the boards at the Belvoir Street Theatre is no gimmick for the times; the times themselves have seen to that. If anything, Kate Mulvaney’s Dr Stockmann is timelier than one might wish. Waiting for the show to start in the theatre foyer, I pondered how a female Dr Stock...

Rather than read The Secret River as ‘true history’ by cordoning off its departures from the hist... more Rather than read The Secret River as ‘true history’ by cordoning off its departures from the historical record (or, as Clendinnen advised, by returning it to the fiction section), we might instead think of it as a critical appropriation of frontier mythology. The genre that best captures this critical appropriation of the national myth is the historical romance. The romance form is released from the demands of historical accuracy implied by realism. The so-called liberties the novelist takes with the historical record no longer need excusing, for they mark the points where a historical defense of progress is mounted. The old criticism of the historical novel as costume drama does not apply to historical romance, which restores the boundaries—between past and present; fictional and historical—that Grenville’s empathy tries to overleap. By restoring these boundaries we can see how The Secret River uses the distance provided by an imagined past to address the social issues of the prese...

First lines: Last month, the surveyor from Newport charged with murder told Manly District Court ... more First lines: Last month, the surveyor from Newport charged with murder told Manly District Court that he did away with his wife because he could no longer stand the sight of her, despite making every effort and trying every angle

Sydney Review of Books, 2017

Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, which turns fifty this year, owes a share of its longevity... more Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, which turns fifty this year, owes a share of its longevity to the modern folklore of vanished white women that has swirled around sites like Hanging Rock in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges since the nineteenth century. Lindsay’s Gothic legend still clings to this unique rock formation. The tale’s enduring appeal and unsettling allure arises from a mist of fact and fiction, casting a magic unspoiled even by the kitsch tourist injunction at Hanging Rock Reserve to ‘Experience the Mystery.’ No matter how often the story is demystified, its ghost lives on in urban legend, with all the appearance of an actual unsolved crime. The mystery lives on in the inescapable question: did it really happen

Review of the book Running Man: Coach Fitz by Tom Lee

The novelist John Barth drew the rich fund of seafaring metaphors in his work from a carefree upb... more The novelist John Barth drew the rich fund of seafaring metaphors in his work from a carefree upbringing in Cambridge, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the tidewater setting of virtually all his work. But it was in the library stacks at Johns Hopkins University, absorbed in the great Eastern tale collections like A Thousand and One Nights and The Ocean of Story, where Barth learned to combine a love of seafaring and storytelling by setting a course that would one day make him a pioneer of postmodern fiction

Joseph Heller’s first novel, Catch-22, met with mixed reviews on its publication in 1961. Critics... more Joseph Heller’s first novel, Catch-22, met with mixed reviews on its publication in 1961. Critics at the New York Times were unsure it was a novel at all, applauding its energy and originality but frowning at its “lack of design” (Stern 1961) and “array of devious figures” (Prescott 1961). To endorse Catch-22 wholly jeopardized one’s patriotism, for the antihero at the center of the action, the reluctant bombardier Yossarian, heralded an inversion of national values that turned cowardice into sanity and desertion into compassion. What looked from a conventional standpoint like vulgarity or “want of craft and sensibility” (Stern 1961) would be earmarked decades later as the ingredients of a new narrative art that mixed high and low culture, hitching T.S. Eliot to the Marx Brothers in a skeptical or postmodern vision of the emerging technocratic world order. In the same year that Philip Roth lamented the inadequacy of the writer’s imagination to a fast-changing reality, Heller’s blend of low comedy and moral drama indicated how to catch up with it, replacing the orderly development of plot and character with repetition, travesty, and comic inversion in a postheroic quest for sanity in a mad, immoral world

The Sot-Weed Factor is widely considered the first and greatest postmodern novel. In a satirical ... more The Sot-Weed Factor is widely considered the first and greatest postmodern novel. In a satirical romp through America’s colonial history, John Barth charted new directions for the contemporary novel by returning to the eighteenth-century novel and its model, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615). Barth’s self-conscious play with genre expectations; deconstruction of binary certainties such as truth/fiction, history/myth, civilized/savage; and demonstration of the agency of narrative art furnished postmodern fiction with its model. The misadventures of Ebenezer Cooke, twin sister Anna, manservant Bertrand Burton, and mercurial tutor Henry Burlingame represent the fullest statement of Barth’s poetics, which aims to secure the liberal middle ground of American political life by rewriting the frontier myth of settler democracy

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 2021

This paper revisits the interpretations of Endgame by Theodor Adorno and Stanley Cavell via an un... more This paper revisits the interpretations of Endgame by Theodor Adorno and Stanley Cavell via an unusual route: Samuel Scheffler’s afterlife conjecture. Scheffler’s thought experiment—based on a doomsday scenario that Beckett’s characters already appear to inhabit—seeks the achievement of the ordinary in an age of climate change by disclosing our evaluative dependence on future generations. I suggest that the paradigm shift to a global subject lies not in the dystopian fiction Scheffler looks to, however, but the “shudder” of the ‘I’ in aesthetic experience, the model for which is Beckett’s Endgame.

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, 2004

ABSTRACT

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, 2004

The most common criticism of Beckett's theatre is its supposed obscurity. Early defenders of ... more The most common criticism of Beckett's theatre is its supposed obscurity. Early defenders of and were themselves criticised as formalists for their inability to say what these plays were 'about' or 'meant'. Adorno's theory of the modernist artwork explained the historical development of art's opaque content and Beckett's own reluctance to explain his plays, solving an impasse in Beckett criticism with his account of the new historical role of aesthetic form as critique.

New German Critique, 2015

Hamlet has long afforded us a gratifying image of ourselves as moderns. In revolt against the est... more Hamlet has long afforded us a gratifying image of ourselves as moderns. In revolt against the establishment, Hamlet's daring, expressive individuality wrings the heart brazed by "damned custom" and plays the befogged royal court, and its "king of shreds and patches," for the fool (3.4.38, 104). The archetype has had a few wardrobe changes in its passage down to us. Morally refined by Henry Mackenzie and William Richardson in the eighteenth century, Hamlet trod the boards in Goethe's Weimar possessed of a pure and noble soul "unfit" for the bloody duty laid on it. 1 A few miles east of Weimar, in the intellectual ferment of Jena, Hamlet was crowned prince of irony on the basis of this unfitness, when wavering was elevated to a principled rejection of the world by German Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel's Romantic irony was a coolly intellectual response to the fall of metaphysics and the cosmic roles of God and man that metaphysics underwrote. With the old synthesis

Routledge eBooks, May 16, 2019

Southerly, 2009

Short stories

Papers on Language and Literature

ABSTRACT

Sydney Review of Books, 2017

Review of the book Running Man: Coach Fitz by Tom Lee

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, 2021

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, 2004

ABSTRACT

Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, 2004

New German Critique, 2015

Literature and politics: pushing the world in certain directions , 2012

The conviction that literature (or art and culture) is antipathetic to politics has a long histor... more The conviction that literature (or art and culture) is antipathetic to politics has a long history. In this paper I sketch some of the consequences of Adorno’s conception of the truth content of the modernist artwork as too fluid to fit an activist politics. I then suggest Adorno’s criticism of the call for the politicization of art (especially in the shape of Lukácsian realism) can be applied a fortiori to Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and post-colonialism, and ask whether a politicized art, even when carried out in the name of marginalized groups—the centre having been left abandoned—is even possible as anything other than propaganda. The two outstanding bills of Cultural Studies—its anti-aesthetic moment, which it owes to Marxism; and its anti-subjective moment, which it owes to poststructuralism—are then tallied up.

Remaking Literary History, 2010

John Barth’s 'Sot-Weed Factor' is something of a paradox: it approaches history in a self-conscio... more John Barth’s 'Sot-Weed Factor' is something of a paradox: it approaches history in a self-conscious turn from realism; it assumes the mantle of the great American novel only to drape it over the model of the 18th century English novel; and its historical subject matter—America’s self-made destiny, not its manifest destiny—is captured in a parody of the historical novel. Barth’s postmodern interest in irony, parody and satire finds a suitably broad canvas in the larger than life historical accounts of adventurers and fortune hunters in search of the new world in the late 17th century. The rogues, clowns and fools in the novel are carnivalesque masks that recall the rugged spirit of the early settlers of colonial America and allow Barth to explore the self-regarding literary concerns later dubbed ‘postmodern.’

Literature and Sensation, 2009

Adorno’s 'Ästhetische Theorie' is a sustained defence of the cognitive and humanizing potential o... more Adorno’s 'Ästhetische Theorie' is a sustained defence of the cognitive and humanizing potential of great art, which is inseparable from the sensuous media against which the academic sciences have allied themselves. Nominalism—or the convergence of the rationalizing forces of science and capital—systematically attacks the sensuous character of experience. The senses are assaulted by the electronic worlds of the culture industry, on the one hand, and robbed of any cognitive capacity by the positivism of the sciences, on the other hand. Today Cultural Studies, like Socialist Realism before it, prescribes the art-alien lessons one is permitted to draw from aesthetic experience. Adorno’s concept of aesthetic negativity defends the ‘sensational’ moment of art from the depredations of popular culture and the idealizing rationality of the sciences. I briefly compare Adorno’s understanding of art and aesthetics as a refuge from ‘the withering of experience’ and Husserl’s conviction that philosophy could shelter the horizonal character of experience from the idealizing currents of scientific explanation. Philosophy may capture the phenomenal essence of experience in Husserl’s phenomenology, but only conceptualize what for Adorno is the not-wholly-conceptualizable character of sensuous perception.

50th anniversary celebration exploring the legacy of Picnic at Hanging Rock, hosted by Genevieve ... more 50th anniversary celebration exploring the legacy of Picnic at Hanging Rock, hosted by Genevieve Jacobs. National Library of Australia, Canberra 28 October, 2017.

The only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the ... more The only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man.
—Beckett, Watt

In dimmost dim. Vasts apart. At bounds of boundless void. Whence no farther. Best worse no farther. No how less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.
—Beckett, Worstward Ho

Recent Beckett scholarship has amassed an impressive bibliography of Samuel Beckett’s reading in philosophy to adorn its portrait not just of a great artist but a great thinker. Richard Begam ranks Beckett alongside post-metaphysical philosophers like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Derrida when he suggests that “more than any other writer in the twentieth century, perhaps in history, Beckett has patiently and persistently undermined the idea of foundations, first principles, the thing-in-itself.” The cataloguing of Beckett’s books reveals an admirable breadth of reading in philosophy, but a no less impressive grasp of Plotinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysus, Thomas Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis, John of the Cross and other mystical theologians, moving Chris Ackerley to remark that Beckett’s great mid-century texts—Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, Godot and Endgame—“constitute perhaps the most important body of religious literature of the past century.” How are we to square these claims? Is the foremost post-foundationalist of the twentieth century also the author of its most significant religious literature? This paper looks at the halting movement of Beckett’s prose, its language of qualification and cancelation, in relation to negative theology. My specific contention is that the horror metaphysicus or dread of the Absolute is the unspeakable subject that sets Beckett’s prose and its “wayfaring” characters in motion. The primary source of Beckett’s aesthetics of failure emerges not from the avant-gardes he frequented but an arrière-garde concern with metaphysics. Beckett’s use of literature to “think” like a philosopher doesn’t solve (or dissolve) any philosophical problems, but reveals the impotence of thought or discourse in the face of the Absolute. I conclude with Hans Blumenberg’s observations on the functional capacity of myth and metaphor to keep at bay the otherwise crushing mass of the unknowable.

A review of Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Roman... more A review of Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance, by James J. Donahue