Panel #7 Session 1
Thursday 30 November - 13:30
Building 25, Room 1
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Chair: Natalie Kon-Yu
All Too Well: metanarrative, storytelling, and the parasocial audience of Taylor Swift
- Jessica Seymour
Fukuoka University
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Taylor Swift’s great talent is storytelling. Her song lyrics represent dense, short-form narratives, exploring themes that resonate through her rich and diverse audience, but are also personal reflections on her life and career at the time of writing. Each of her studio albums represents an ‘era’ in her life; her lyrics represent what it felt like to be the age she was when she produced them, the people she dated, the books and films she was enjoying, etc. Throughout her career, Swift’s personal and private life has been widely speculated upon – both by gossip magazines, legitimate news organisations, her fans, and her detractors – which has led to the creation of a kind of metanarrative of her life. Her biography has no single author, but rather hundreds of speculative authors drawing on rumours and paparazzi photos to build a complete image of who she is. Swift has often worked to strategically enforce elements of that metanarrative, while other elements she has left up to speculation. It is this version of her, this meta-persona, that the audience has a relationship with.
This paper argues that when Swift draws on her personal experience and reproduces it in her music, she is rewarding her fans’ parasocial relationship with her, thus reinforcing and strengthening that bond. By exploring Swift’s handling of themes like reputation, ownership, love, and gender, we can see how the lyrics she writes are designed to allude to key events in her meta-persona.
Dr Jessica Seymour is an Australian researcher and lecturer at Fukuoka University, Japan. Her research interests include children’s and young adult literature, Tolkien studies, popular culture, and literary adaptation. She has contributed chapters to several essay collections, which range in topic from fan studies, to online/transmedia writing, to TV series like Doctor Who and Supernatural, to ecocriticism in the works of JRR Tolkien.
Twenty-first Century écriture féminine: examining revisionist mythmaking and the representation of women in contemporary mythopoeic fiction
- Juliette Sauvage
University of the Sunshine Coast
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The marginalisation of women characters in mythological stories has been the focus of many poetic and subsequent academic works, focusing on revising these roles from the previously patriarchally-reinforced myths. Coined revisionist mythmaking by Alicia Ostriker (1982), this process of revising myths has emerged as the basis for a burgeoning genre of contemporary fiction, a topic which has received less academic scrutiny. The writing in this genre embodies twenty-first century écriture féminine in its challenge to outdated myths and mythologies, destabilising their embedded patriarchal frameworks. It revises women’s marginalisation or silencing and facilitates the telling of their own stories, (re)introducing more diverse voices to transform women’s representation and correct related patriarchal canons reinforced through hundreds of years of storytelling. While existing critical literature explores revisionist mythmaking in poetry or a small number of works of prose, there has been little scrutiny afforded to the ways these novels are crafted through a diachronic exploration of the genesis and evolution of the genre. This paper reviews two key works of revisionist mythmaking fiction, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) and Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018). It examines their craft elements, reflects on the evolution of the form, and begins to construct a framework that maps the ways revising these stories has changed, and continues to change.
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Juliette is currently undertaking her PhD at UniSC in the field of creative writing and is a sessional academic in English studies as well. Her research focuses on women’s storytelling and women’s mythology fantasy fiction. She has an upcoming publication in FuLiA/UFMG on a creative writing project around the history of women’s football in Oceania.
Clytemnestra Needs to Talk (a verbal performance)
- Kirk Dodd
University of Sydney
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Aligned with Orality and Poetry – writing for scripted performance – this creative reading will ‘perform’ an excerpt from my ‘Shakespearean’ blank verse drama, The Tragicall Historie of Agamemnon, which aims to ‘Shakespeareanize’ the ancient Greek myth of Agamemnon’s tragic return to his wife Clytemnestra following the ten-year siege of Troy having sacrificed their daughter to the Gods without her permission. This treatment imitates the compositional style of Shakespeare and adopts some trademarks of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy to refashion the dynamics of the myth. Where Greek tragedy always plays out before the castle walls, Shakespeare always takes us behind those castle walls into the banquet halls, the meeting rooms and the bedrooms—creating problems when the mythos tells us Clytemnestra had already ‘re-partnered’ with Agamemnon’s arch enemy (Aegisthus) as part of her deep-seated commitment to revenge. Where this is revealed only at the end of Aeschylus’s play, it must be camouflaged in a Shakespearean treatment, so Aegisthus disguises himself as a court jester hired by Clytemnestra for her melancholy, thus engaging Shakespeare’s habit of using disguises and his penchant for juxtaposing the comic and the tragic. This play received development funding from Create NSW and was a semi-finalist for the Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries award at the American Shakespeare Center.
Kirk Dodd is a Lecturer in the discipline of English at the University of Sydney where he teaches Writing and Rhetoric, Shakespeare, Creative Writing and Poetics. Completing his PhD in Creative Writing at the University of New South Wales, he publishes regularly in scholarly journals on Shakespeare’s Rhetoric and has developed two ‘Shakespearean’ blank verse dramas. His first play, The Tragicall Historie of Woollarawarre Bennelong, was shortlisted for the Griffin Award (2018) and is published by Australian Plays (2021); his second play, The Tragicall Historie of Agamemnon, was a semi-finalist for the Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries award run by the American Shakespeare Center.