Dialogues

The Dialogues theme of Other Worlds consisted in conversations, ideas, essays, and academic publications that were put into motion by the interactions between the four set themes. The critical aims were aligned with the creative ones: to think about the ‘world’ of ‘world literature’ from the perspective of local literary activities as they resonate with or connect with literary worlds elsewhere. It was led by the two literary critics on the team, Anthony Uhlmann and Ben Etherington, along with Samantha Trayhurn, the project’s doctoral student.

Anthony Uhlmann organised a number of seminars over the course of the project and produced academic and creative work related to the other four themes on the project. Within the Dialogue theme, and informed by the project as a whole, he published a major study of the work of project participant J. M. Coetzee, entitled J. M. Coetzee, Truth, Meaning, Fiction, with Bloomsbury Academic.

He organised two seminars on major Australian writers Gerald Murnane and Gail Jones (another participant in the project), which have both resulted in collections of essays situating their works in relation to the representation of worlds. The first, which involved Sam Trayhurn and Alexis Wright, on Gerald Murnane, ‘Another World in This One: Gerald Murnane’s Fiction’, took place in Goroke Victoria on 7 December 2017, and generated significant impact, with the event resulting in a major feature article on Murnane published by the New York Times Magazine. A collection of essays on Murnane, edited by Uhlmann, has now been published with Sydney University Press. On June 21, 2019 he organised an event on Gail Jones’ work, ‘Inner Worlds: Gail Jones’ Fiction’, bringing together scholars across Australia. This too has resulted in a collection of essays with Sydney University Press which is currently in production with a publication date set for 2021.

He has further collaborated with Coetzee and Jones on the events related to the Southern Encounters theme, participating in the Writing from the South event, and producing his first novel, Saint Antony in His Desert, which was informed by the themes of the project and focused on representations of place in Sydney and Alice Springs. He worked with Jose on the Antipodean China, participating in this event. He also assisted Jose by organising and facilitating the China Australia Literary Forums in 2017 (when a delegation including Uhlmann, Jose and Wright travelled to Guangzhou) and in 2019 when the fifth event was staged in Melbourne, again including Uhlmann, Jose, and Wright among. These events, which began in 2011 have been edited into a book by Jose. Uhlmann also worked alongside Alexis Wright in helping to facilitate the trip to Burketown to work on the documentaries developed by Wright and Etherington on Clarence Walden. Drawing on this experience in part Uhlmann delivered a paper on Wright’s work at the 2020 ASAL conference.

Drawing together these strands, Uhlmann’s work considers how each approach adds to our understanding of the capacity of literary form to inform our idea of the world.

Ben Etherington’s contributions considered the way the ideas and projects generated by Other Worlds depart from existing assumptions in world literary studies. He developed, and is continuing to develop, the notion of ‘literary meridians’ to conceptualise how local and localised practices from quite different parts of the world align or resonate with each other. His approach was three-pronged: to outline and critique the way in which recent world literary studies has defaulted to ‘network thinking’ when working between literary contexts; to recuperate the tradition of humanistic world literary criticism for which world literature is a ‘speculative literary totality’; and to develop the notion of ‘literary meridians’, adapting Paul Celan’s conception of meridians and pushing against the sociological notion of a ‘Greenwich meridian of literature’ proposed by Pascale Casanova. He convened the three-day international conference Caribbean Meridians, which considered non-networked relations between the Caribbean, Australia and elsewhere. This included a keynote discussion with team member Alexis Wright on her reading of Caribbean authors. He also developed an essay on Coetzee’s literary meridian of ‘the South’ as part of the ‘Southern Encounters’ theme, and worked with Wright and storyteller in residence Clarence Walden to produce Nothing but the Truth for ABC Radio National.