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ItemNatural Selection: A translation-in-progress of Bestiario (2014) by Beatriz Restrepo(Axon: Creative Explorations, 2018-05-01)This work uses translation and diagramming as devices in offering an interpretation of Colombian poet Beatriz Restrepo’s 2014 collection Bestiario. The collection indexes sixty animals in sixty poems (a translation of ten poems taken from the collection’s first section are given here), in reference to the medieval Bestiarium Vocabularium, a formative element in the encyclopaedic tradition that permeates the natural sciences. My translation also uses the affordances of visual metaphor to convey my reading of Restrepo’s ‘Bestiary’ as concerned with the mutual nesting of human and non-human animal worlds — with beasts as human inventions, and with human invention as critically shaping animal worlds. Each poem frames a species either in terms of its implication in a human social practice or in terms of its presence in a cultural imaginary — not bees, for instance, but the bees of the novel Pedro Páramo; not albatrosses, but Baudelaire’s ‘Albatross’. Not least among such social practices is the domesticating technology of alphabetisation in the cataloguing of the more-than-human. I have re-ordered Restrepo’s poems to stress this. As images, the translated poems point to the historical use of word and image, equally, as tools in the human organisation of species and inter-species relationships. The poems’ material aspect also correlates the evolution of species with the selective nature of translation, which proceeds by engendering variations that cumulatively deliver the translated text. Creative decisions in the event are granular, manifesting as innumerable points of greater or lesser divergence from the appearance, sound and meaning of an original. Following on from the diagrammatic interpretation are Beatriz’s original poems in Spanish and my more ‘transparent’ translations of them into English. I include these here, imagining that comparison across versions can further elucidate the material poetics of translational and creative process.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTouching stories: Objects, writing, diffraction and the ethical hazard of self-reflexivity(Australasian Association of Writing Programs, 2018-10-01)This article takes up Donna Haraway’s discussion of ‘diffraction’ as a remedial to the literal self-centredness of the figure of reflection, in order to propose an alternative learning objective for creative writing curricula. There, currently, ‘reflective learning’ is a common if implicit objective, often manifesting in the form of journal-keeping and some kinds of writing exercises, while a capacity for ‘reflection’ can be seen at least bureaucratically to validate the existence per se of university writing programs (Green & Williams 2018). In the educational literature, self-reflexive contemplation of one’s own experiences is said to be preliminary to the achievement of deep, life-long and transformative knowledge (Ryan & Ryan 2012). But, from a posthumanist standpoint, the discourse around reflection in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning appears ideologically committed to a subjectivity that is integral, insular and (thus) humanist, and constitutionally resistant to transformation. Here, I make use of the post-secondary educational literature on ‘object-based learning’ (OBL) to suggest that students’ touching of objects can be conducive to diffractive rather than reflective learning – that is, conducive to learning that avoids the humanist atomisation of subject from object and instead entails establishing one’s interconnectedness with environments. To this end, I propose a way to frame OBL activities as developing a reciprocal relationship between writing subjects and objects of study, in which students situate their writing not as a reflection on/of objects ‘out there’ in the world, but rather as an active and literal co-creation of the self-as-world.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAssembling bodies: A new materialist approach to writing practice(The Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra, 2015)How might some recent philosophical critiques grouped under the rubric of a ‘new materialism’ be brought to bear productively on creative writing practice and pedagogy? This article argues that the new materialism’s particular – and particularly intensified – awareness of the materiality of the writing process and of its textual products can be useful for writers. I consider how the environment in which one creates might look within a new materialist view, outlining what I propose to be one of its central features: the clinamen. I describe how feminist physicist Karen Barad’s concept of intra-activity can be used to view the writing environment as a posthuman assemblage of intra-acting relata, before proposing the figure of the clinamen as able to describe the movement of matter within this assemblage. My argument, ultimately, is that this movement is conducive to the production of novelty in both writing experience and product: it is through the unpredictability of the clinamen’s movement that new textual directions can be brought about. I make reference to my own creative process on this score – taking as examples a collaborative writing workshop I led and an exhibited work of conceptual writing – in order to demonstrate some ways in which new materialisms can prove useful for the proliferation of writing.