Text: Journal of writing and writing courses, 2025
With its emphasis on the transgression of "natural" boundaries, the Gothic has always been a powe... more With its emphasis on the transgression of "natural" boundaries, the Gothic has always been a powerful medium for ecological themes. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) focuses on a clash between civilised Europe and the wilderness on its fringes. Published at the height of Victorian techno-optimism, it shifts genres from Gothic horror to thriller as its protagonists apply modern science to determine the limits of the titular Count's supernatural powers. The novel ends with the victory of their scientific-rationalist mindset and the taming of the dangerous natural world represented through Dracula's uncanny hybridity. Stoker's Dracula has had an enormous impact on horror and thriller genres, but Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood (2023) presents a notable inversion of both its central conflict and its structure. In Birnam Wood, the wild fringes of rural New Zealand are threatened by the civilised centre, represented by American tech-mogul Robert Lemoine. The novel gradually shifts from thriller to the horror genre, as Lemoine's rationalistic mindset leads him into atrocity. His predations are enabled by his technological hybridity, through which he excerpts an almost supernatural influence over his environment. Birnam Wood provides an intriguing model for contemporary EcoGothic narratives, using the subversion of thriller and horror structures to foreground contemporary ecological anxieties.
Although Shakespeare and his plays have been a frequent subject of videogame adaptations in the p... more Although Shakespeare and his plays have been a frequent subject of videogame adaptations in the past, these have often been confined to either theatre-making games (which present the staging of Shakespeare plays using the mechanisms of strategy or simulation videogame genres) of education/trivia games that aim to familiarise players with Shakespeare's texts. While references to Shakespeare abound in videogames, there have been relatively few attempts to directly adapt one of his plays into the form of an interactive videogame narrative, where the player controls one or more of the principal characters and can affect the outcome of the story. This paper will examine four videogame adaptations of Shakespeare's Hamlet, whose differing approaches to player-agency and interactivity in relation to narrative of the classic play demonstrate the interactive potential of Shakespearean drama. While the player-driven overwriting or rewriting of the classic text may appear irreverent, it is, in each game, dependent on some conception the original play and the past tradition that it represents, which is translated into the contemporary medium of the videogame. This illustrates Jacques Derrida's contention that the longevity and translatability of Shakespearean texts are due to their 'spectral' qualities, in that they allow the past to be reexamined through the lens of the present and vice versa.
Because of its looping, non-linear structure, the short story cycle is ideally suited to capture ... more Because of its looping, non-linear structure, the short story cycle is ideally suited to capture the everyday experience of the Anthropocene, particularly as it manifests through encounters with climate disaster. The dualistic nature of the short story cycle demands that its narratives be at once self-sufficient and interrelated. Its simultaneously fragmented and unified structure has the potential to address the complex interconnections and enmeshments of human and environmental elements in the Anthropocene in ways that work to integrate the consideration of climate disasters into everyday life. A Constant Hum (2019) by Alice Bishop, Florida (2018) by Lauren Groff and How High We Go in the Dark (2022) by Sequoia Nagamatsu are all story cycles that centre, in some respects, on climate disasters. This article compares and contrasts how these authors approach disaster as a unifying theme or focus in their respective short story cycles, exploring their use of the non-linear form to add...
The PhD in European Studies (PhD Training Hub Series)
In this video, Dr Julian Novitz interviews Associate Professor Bruno Mascitelli about PhDs in Eur... more In this video, Dr Julian Novitz interviews Associate Professor Bruno Mascitelli about PhDs in European Studies. This is part of the PhD Training Hub series
In this video, Dr Julian Novitz interviews Professor Darren Tofts about different aspects of a Ph... more In this video, Dr Julian Novitz interviews Professor Darren Tofts about different aspects of a PhD. This is part of the PhD Training Hub series
Though often contested and difficult to define, the novella has become more visible in Australian... more Though often contested and difficult to define, the novella has become more visible in Australian literature in recent years. This increased interest in the novella has often been connected to developments in digital technology and reading culture. Some commentators suggest that the increased distractibility and time poverty of contemporary audiences may make shorter literary works more appealing (Dale 2012), while others claim that the reduced costs of digital publishing may make novellas more commercially viable (Tan 2016). This paper will examine and assess these claims in the context of past and current debate around the status of the novella, using Nick Earls’ Wisdom Tree (2016) sequence of novellas as a case study so as to consider whether the current rise of digital publishing platforms has shifted the ways in which the form is approached and understood. This discussion has direct implications for fiction writers considering the advantages and affordances of the novella. Writ...
When addressing the rise of mass media, literary authors of the late twentieth century often expr... more When addressing the rise of mass media, literary authors of the late twentieth century often expressed an ‘anxiety of obsolescence’ (Fitzpatrick 2006) in their work: an acute awareness of being potentially displaced. This often led them to adopt an attitude of defiance in the face of technological change. Many contemporary literary authors adopt a similar oppositional attitude towards the rise and encroachment of networked technology, but retreating to the increasingly peripheral territory of ‘pure’ print-based literature is no longer easy. Digital technology presents not only the possibility of displacement but also that of transformation, with its spread threatening to fundamentally alter the practice of reading and writing. Possibly in response to the radical upheavals faced by Australian literary culture due to the rise of electronic publishing since 2012, recent works by three established Australian authors – Amnesia by Peter Carey (2014), the Wisdom Tree novella sequence by Ni...
Disco Elysium demonstrates many hallmarks of the Gothic through its storyline and representationa... more Disco Elysium demonstrates many hallmarks of the Gothic through its storyline and representational elements, particularly its emphasis on the instability of its protagonist, the sense of decline and decay conveyed through its setting, and the interconnected secret histories that are revealed through exploration. Furthermore, many of the game’s stylistic and ludic features, such as its dense description and emotive language, and its overwhelming array of options, interactions, and responses, can be understood as engagements with the uncanny and disorienting excess of the Gothic tradition. These Gothic elements manifest most frequently through the game’s attempt to represent psychological complexity within its role playing system, its depictions of urban spaces, and its approach to questions of unresolved memory and history. The presence of these Gothic features in Disco Elysium work to contest the game’s categorisation as a ‘detective role playing game.’ While the genres are closely ...
References to futurism typically present technology as a source of threat and/or reform, and in T... more References to futurism typically present technology as a source of threat and/or reform, and in The Future of Writing, editor John Potts has assembled a wide range of contributors and perspectives to discuss such threat and/or reform to writing as we know it. The Future of Writing considers the impact of online technologies on the structures and models of knowledge production (and the business of it)-where 'disruption' is a 'favoured descriptive word' (3)-as well as the impact that written content may exert on our future writing and reading practices.
Although Shakespeare and his plays have been a frequent subject of videogame adaptations in the p... more Although Shakespeare and his plays have been a frequent subject of videogame adaptations in the past, these have often been confined to either theatre-making games (which present the staging of Shakespeare plays using the mechanisms of strategy or simulation videogame genres) of education/trivia games that aim to familiarise players with Shakespeare’s texts. While references to Shakespeare abound in videogames, there have been relatively few attempts to directly adapt one of his plays into the form of an interactive videogame narrative, where the player controls one or more of the principal characters and can affect the outcome of the story. This paper will examine four videogame adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose differing approaches to player-agency and interactivity in relation to narrative of the classic play demonstrate the interactive potential of Shakespearean drama. While the player-driven overwriting or rewriting of the classic text may appear irreverent, it is, in ...
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