Writing on the Edge: Gary Crew's Fiction

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Separation Anxiety in Three of Gillian Rubinstein's Collaborative Picture Story Books

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How to be Happy by Calling for Change: Constructs of Happiness and Meaningfulness Amongst Social Movement Activists

This paper focuses on how social movement activists view happiness in relation to their political involvement. Interviewers asked activists questions about their personal histories and feelings. The phenomenological strategy involved focused on interviews with subjects who could speak richly about their commitments and emotions. The data from the 11 subjects revealed that there was no simple relationship between a commitment to social activism and subjects’ experiences of happiness. Several subjects oriented their responses to the relationship between meaningfulness, activism, and happiness. In discussion of the analyzed data, the authors suggest that a relationship is evident between the positions articulated by interviewees and their levels of engagement in and withdrawal from activis

Nights at the airport

A personal narrative is presented in which the author explains her experiences while waiting for a plane at the airport at night

Harry Potter and the terrors of the toilet

The Harry Potter series focuses upon the toilet as a site for heroic action and a threshold between worlds as well as a more traditional place for boys to be bullied and girls to weep. This article offers a Kristevan reading of the toilets as abject in Harry Potter, and shows how this concept helps us make sense of wider issues within the series, especially Harry's uneasy relation to the maternal. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.C

The paradoxes of history in Crew and Woolman's 'Tagged' and Crew and Tan's 'Memorial'

The publication of two illustrated books with verbal text by the Australian writer Gary Crew provides an opportunity to compare the presentation of war memories in picture story book and graphic novel format. Gary Crew and Shaun Tan's Memorial (1999) is a thought-provoking picture story book while Crew and Steven Woolman's Tagged (1997) is an idiosyncratic graphic novel. The picture story book illustrations depict the commemorative tree as more real, more present than the books' human beings. The verbal text asserts that memory will live on through generations of the war veterans' family, as in the tree, but the illustrations of the cutting down of the tree and the verbal text revealing a veteran's self-censorship reveal these claims to be at best tenuous, at worst, false. Nevertheless, despite the current town council's disrespect for the commemorative tree, the Anzac Day ceremony remains a socially sanctioned rite of remembering war. The illustrations to Tagged represent a war veteran's confused mind and his compulsive reliving of his past as confusing visual images with a lack of clear cues for the reader's eye to follow, as the boy observer moves more deeply into the labyrinthine building where the man hides. While Memorial's war memorials are complete, public, in good condition and easily accessible, the bewildering passages and openings of Tagged's building suggest the man's stuck memories, the boy's problems with interpreting war images and also a society's not altogether successful attempt to repress collective acknowledgement of its war past. In contrast with Memorial, Tagged is a memorial to the unknown soldier, offering a different kind of historical truth to any officials, public, empty tomb

Aspects of stuckness in Mervyn Peakes's fiction / Alice Mills

"This thesis argues that stuckness is a central trope in all of Mervyn Peake's extended works of fiction and that most of Peake's characters become stuck at critical points in their lives."Doctor of Philosoph