Janet Frame’s World of Books

The reading habits of an author are always of interest, and in the case of Janet Frame, notoriously protective about her inner life but in her autobiographies fluent and enthusiastic about her life as a reader, such a study seems promising.

Time To Make A Song And Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s

‘The Terrible Screaming’ is a short story by the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, in which a city is awakened in the night by a terrible screaming which everyone ignores, fearing that if they admit to hearing it they will be labelled insane. The ‘city’, Murray Edmond suggests, can be read as New Zealand, or more specifically Auckland, where Frame - who might be claimed as ‘our writer of the 60s’ - spent 15 months in Oakley psychiatric hospital.

A Home in This World: the Representation of Location and Identity in the Prose Fiction Texts of Katherine Mansfield, Robin Hyde and Janet Frame

<p>There is no home in this world for colonising peoples, but the desire for a place or a state to call home permeates their literature. The act of colonising is an act of dispossession, not only for the autochthonous peoples, but for the colonising peoples too. The colonising peoples can never regain their relationship of autochthonicity to their imperial nation, but neither can they ever gain a truly autochthonous relationship to the colonised land, because the founding act of dispossession stands in their way. The loss of autochthonous identity and location is one which can never be fulfilled. There is no longer a home to go to. The anxiety about identity and location which this loss produces is a basic condition of coloniality which cannot be escaped. This anxiety about identity and location can be tracked through the prose fiction writings of Katherine Mansfield, Robin Hyde and Janet Frame. Although the founding loss of autochthonicity cannot be undone or supplemented, it can be displaced, denied, disavowed or seized and interrogated. Although this condition of coloniality is produced by a founding moment in history, the way in which that condition is manifested in the texts is not fixed and transhistorical. Coloniality is displayed differently in each of the three groups of texts examined here. The dynamics of disavowal characterise the texts of both Mansfield and Hyde, but the products of this disavowal differ. Whilst the texts of Mansfield produce the colonising subject as a discriminated subject, the texts of Hyde produce the colonised subject as a discriminated subject. Frame's text interrogates its coloniality rather than disavowing it and attempts to articulate the foundering moments of individual and national identity rather than their founding moments. Under the hegemony of multinational consumer capital, the permanent nostalgia, which is the condition of coloniality, has become, also, the condition of the world.</p>

A Home in This World: the Representation of Location and Identity in the Prose Fiction Texts of Katherine Mansfield, Robin Hyde and Janet Frame

<p>There is no home in this world for colonising peoples, but the desire for a place or a state to call home permeates their literature. The act of colonising is an act of dispossession, not only for the autochthonous peoples, but for the colonising peoples too. The colonising peoples can never regain their relationship of autochthonicity to their imperial nation, but neither can they ever gain a truly autochthonous relationship to the colonised land, because the founding act of dispossession stands in their way. The loss of autochthonous identity and location is one which can never be fulfilled. There is no longer a home to go to. The anxiety about identity and location which this loss produces is a basic condition of coloniality which cannot be escaped. This anxiety about identity and location can be tracked through the prose fiction writings of Katherine Mansfield, Robin Hyde and Janet Frame. Although the founding loss of autochthonicity cannot be undone or supplemented, it can be displaced, denied, disavowed or seized and interrogated. Although this condition of coloniality is produced by a founding moment in history, the way in which that condition is manifested in the texts is not fixed and transhistorical. Coloniality is displayed differently in each of the three groups of texts examined here. The dynamics of disavowal characterise the texts of both Mansfield and Hyde, but the products of this disavowal differ. Whilst the texts of Mansfield produce the colonising subject as a discriminated subject, the texts of Hyde produce the colonised subject as a discriminated subject. Frame's text interrogates its coloniality rather than disavowing it and attempts to articulate the foundering moments of individual and national identity rather than their founding moments. Under the hegemony of multinational consumer capital, the permanent nostalgia, which is the condition of coloniality, has become, also, the condition of the world.</p>

Conclusion

This chapter briefly examines the endurance of debates about ‘irony’ today. It argues that contemporary claims about the politics of irony in fact reflect unresolved debates from the reception of ‘postmodern metafiction’ more generally. This is especially the case following the emergence of a ‘new sincerity’. The chapter suggests that the contemporary public reception of ‘postmodernism’—its aesthetics and politics—generally misrecognizes the object of critique. This reception does not recognize what career metafictionists such as J. M. Coetzee, Janet Frame, and Philip Roth were actually doing. The chapter concludes by suggesting the history of postwar fiction, freed from the encumbrances of various critical enterprises, should now proceed by paying closer attention to the careers and archives of the writers we are examining.

Faces in the Water

This chapter examines how New Zealand author Janet Frame responded to both the demands of a national literature and biographical enquiry into her life. Frame in her early work courts the idea that madness provides special insight, an understanding that was read biographically by the masculine cultural nationalist coterie surrounding her at this time. However, in her later work she seeks to replace this public image with her own vision of authorship. Between two pairs of novels from the 1960s and 1970s, as well as her 1980s autobiographies, this chapter shows a dimension of metafiction that is less discussed, in which the form is used by an author to attempt to control her reception and to prescribe certain approaches. In particular, Frame would become preoccupied with an understanding of public attention as a form of contamination, and would in turn seek a purity of literary vision. The chapter closes by showing how representations of Frame’s life by biographers and film-makers, even after her death, have continued to participate in battles over the public reception of the author within New Zealand literary culture.

Metafiction and the Postwar Novel

This book examines the origins, poetics, and capacities of self-reflexive fiction across the globe after World War II. Focusing on three authors’ careers—J. M. Coetzee, Janet Frame, and Philip Roth—it seeks to circumvent the large-scale theoretical paradigms (such as ‘postmodernism’) that have long been deployed to describe this writing. The book does so by developing new terms for discussing the intimacies of metafictional writing, derived from the writing of Miguel de Cervantes and J. L. Borges. The ‘self of writing’ refers to the figure of the author that a writer may imagine exists independently from discourse. The ‘public author as signature’ represents the public understandings of an author that emerge from biography and the author’s corpus itself. The book shows how these figures of authorship are handled by authors, as they draw on the materials offered by their own corpora and communities of readers. Sometimes, this book shows, authors invent distinctively literary ways of adjudicating enduring political debates: the responsibility of a novelist to the political aspirations of a community, the ability of the novel to pursue justice on behalf of others, and the public good that literature serves. Yet this is not a story of unmitigated success: the book also demonstrates how metafiction can be used as a way to close down interpretive schemes and to avoid contributing to public value. Through a close focus on literary environments, the book ultimately gives a finer-grained account of the history of postwar metafiction, and offers new ways of theorizing the relationship between fiction, life-writing, and literary institutions.

Tres poemas

Paula Busseniers es originaria del norte de Bélgica. Profesora de la UV, es coautora de artículos y capítulos sobre la enseñanza del inglés; cotraductora de Huesos de jilguero (UV), antología poética de Janet Frame; e integrande de "Voceras", grupo de lectura de poesía en espacios públicos.

La geometría del acto traductivo

A partir de un poema argumentativo–conceptual de Janet Frame se analizan fenómenos de domesticación y extrañamiento para definir la traducción como acto creativo. La imagen del círculo propuesto por Benjamin sirve para reflexionar sobre la naturaleza performativa de la traducción y como plataforma para entender la importancia del intersticio en la traducción cultural. Se usa el método contrastivo entre texto fuente y versión respaldado por teoría de la traducción. Asimismo, se recurre a la ilustración didáctico–interpretativa lograda en el aula de literatura.