Janet Frame

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Fossil Capacities in the Work of Janet Frame

The Guyanese novelist and critic Wilson Harris defines the word fossil in an idiosyncratic sense, to invoke ‘a rhythmic capacity to re-sense contrasting spaces and to suggest that a curious rapport exists between ruin and origin as latent to arts of genesis’ – prior to hinting that such a ‘heterogeneous scale’ of temporality can be seen to exist within the fictional universe fashioned by Janet Frame. This, in turn, implies that any appreciation of her work’s embeddedness in local (South Pacific) realities must simultaneously take account of the depths of spatiality created by means of her particular aesthetics. This article attempts to address Frame’s strange interest in ghostly vestiges of superseded experience, which she expresses through recurring allusions to subterranean strata of landscape encrypting a sense of ‘epochs and ages gone’ – as she phrases this in Living in the Maniototo. Indeed her settings beg the question of a ‘native capacity’ (another Harrisian phrase) possibly underlying her approach to New Zealand contemporary culture. Intriguingly, she probes the matter through her repeated evocation of reputedly extinct animal species – dinosaur, moa, takahe – which she sees in some cases to be gesturing towards the possibility of resuscitation, as with the tuatara mentioned in Towards Another Summer, and quite in keeping with an aesthetics of excavation subordinated to her quest for occulted forms of being and knowing. As some of Frame’s characters conceive this, it is a matter of realising that ‘the human eye is not consistent’ and can be supplemented through a form of third-eye vision paradoxically inherited in spite of the losses of history.Peer reviewe

The Poetics of Dissolution: The Representation of Maori Culture in Janet Frame's Fiction

This essay examines Janet Frame's early short story "The Lagoon", and argues that the story alludes to Maori experience, albeit tangentially, in a way which anticipates similar evocations in novels such as A State of Siege and The Carpathians. A close reading shows that cultural imperialism in Frame runs parallel to, or is a side-effect of, interpersonal appropriations. These, in turn, seem to be rooted in human beings' reluctance to accommodate otherness. Recurrently Janet Frame points to a model of cultural and interpersonal interaction which is detached from proprietorial forms of appropriation, but which entails nothing less than the dissolution of the ruling ego. Selfdissolution shall emerge in this reading as the key to a utopian state consisting of the total permeability between the self and the remainder of the world. In this state, transactions become reciprocal since the divisions between self and non-self no longer exist

(Not) being at home: Hsu Ming Teo's Behind the Moon (2005) and Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel (2012)

This article examines some interventions of Asian Australian writing into the debate over multiculturalism, and the shift from negative stereotyping of Asian migrants, to reification of racial divisions and propagation of a masked racism, to the creation of new alignments and the revival of pre-existing affiliations by migrant and second generation subjects. It compares the practices of not-at-homeness by Asian migrants and their descendants and white Australians in Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon with those of a Sri Lankan refugee and a white Australian traveller in Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel. The changing concepts of belonging in the novels show a realignment of core and periphery relations within the nation state under the pressures of multiculturalism and globalization: where home is and how it is configured are questions as important for white Australians whose sense of territory is challenged as they are for Asian migrants who seek to establish a new belonging

KPS-1b: The First Transiting Exoplanet Discovered Using an Amateur Astronomer's Wide-field CCD Data

We report the discovery of the transiting hot Jupiter KPS-1b. This exoplanet orbits a V = 13.0 K1-type main sequence star every 1.7 days, has a mass of 1.090 (+0.086 -0.087) MJup and a radius of 1.03 (+0.13 -0.12) RJup. The discovery was made by the prototype Kourovka Planet Search (KPS) project, which used wide-field CCD data gathered by an amateur astronomer using readily available and relatively affordable equipment. Here we describe the equipment and observing technique used for the discovery of KPS-1b, its characterization with spectroscopic observations by the SOPHIE spectrograph and with high-precision photometry obtained with 1m class telescopes. We also outline the KPS project evolution into the Galactic Plane eXoplanet survey. The discovery of KPS-1b represents a new major step of the contribution of amateur astronomers to the burgeoning field of exoplanetology

"Grace of the Crocodiles" Towards Deterritorialization of Culture in Robert Drewe's Grace

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Book Reviews

Mark Williams, Leaving the Highway: Six Contemporary New Zealand Novelists. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1990. 232 pp. £17.50