Panel #1 Session 3
Wednesday 29 November - 11:30
Building 25, Main Room
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Nonkingdom: Its Laws and Ways
- Louise Katz
Sydney University
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‘Laws and Ways of Nonkingdom’ is an insomniac exposition in which I design utopias when sleep won’t come. Of course utopias are impossible but as the author mentions at the outset, ‘utopian thinking can keep you just this side of despair at 3.00 am when the creatures with claws hidden in padded paws emerge from the cracks to eat your lungs’. This tract, in that sense, is a kind of therapy.
Nonkingdom contains aspects of manifesto in that it lists propositions for radical change; it also involves a certain amount of ranting. It is saved from being a diatribe however, as it contains less invective and more humour - and hope, though not optimism. This manifesto/rant opens with a ‘bombastardry warning’, then begins laying out some of the laws of the imaginary kingdom. These laws contain within them critiques of current social, economic and political tendencies and habits of thought. A range of aspects of 21st century, largely Western, culture are explored with great vehemence, including political campaigning, marketing, architecture, and education. Alternatives to some aspects of the status quo are occasionally provided with illustrations, visual and verbal, the latter referencing David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and Harry O Frankfurt’s Bullshit Discourse.
The conclusion contains some hope for human and other animals, and reiterates Nonkingdom’s worth as an imaginative exercise. It justifies envisioning places and ways of being that disavow current value systems, for those systems are so pernicious that if they remain unchecked, will spell out planetary catastrophe.
I teach critical and creative skills at Sydney University, and previously taught creative writing at UTS. I write fiction, some of which has received awards. My most recent novel, The Orchid Nursery, a dystopia, presents the opposite starting point to my proposal for this conference. My research interests, as reflected in my academic publications, include theories of monstrosity, of creativity and malcreativity, utopian studies, the abuse of language in corporatese, and what I think of as zombilingo. My research is practice-led and my fictive writing practice is in part research-based. Before I came to writing I worked as a visual artist.
On Lydia Davis’s ‘A Position at the University’ as a description of (among others) me
- Julienne van Loon
University of Melbourne
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I was the first in my family to go to university and more than three decades after I first stepped onto a university campus, I remain institutionalised therein. In this essay, I reflect on the short prose piece “A Position at the University” by Lydia Davis and why it struck such a chord with me when I first came across it in the early stages of my academic career. Davis’s work prompts me to consider more fully what it really means to be granted a position at the university, and then what it means to go on filling such a position, especially as a creative writer, a person from a working-class family, a single parent, a feminist posthumanist. In this lyric essay, I contemplate the ways in which the university positions a person like me: structurally, imaginatively, affectively and in terms of my relation to others.
Julienne van Loon is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent books are The Thinking Woman (2019) and the co-edited collection A to Z of Creative Writing Methods (2023). She is Managing Editor at TEXT and a series editor for the Bloomsbury Academic Research in Creative Writing series.