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Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor

by John Carmody, et al.
July 2023, no. 455

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Letters to the Editor

by Rod Moran, et al.
June 2023, no. 454

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Letters to the Editor

by Neal Morrisey, et al.
May 2023, no. 453

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Letters to the Editor

by Paul Morgan & Frances Wilson
April 2023, no. 452

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Letters to the Editor

by Australian Book Review
December 2022, no. 449

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Letters to the Editor

by Gabriella Edelstein, Patricia Clarke, Jenny Esots, John Seymour, Margaret Knight and David Mason
November 2022, no. 448

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There is much to enjoy in the March issue of ABR. I found Patrick McCaughey’s ‘A Sketch Portrait of Fred Williams’ particularly illuminating and moving. A fine record of a deep friendship, rare in the annals of art writing in Australia. Also, John Mateer’s ‘Diary’ reflections on a symposium at Edith Cowan University, inspired by the American philosopher Arthur Danto’s ‘The Abuse’, give us notice of imaginative conversations and events coming from the west.

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What’s your point?

Dear Editor,

John Carmody, in the June issue, writes a letter loaded with tendentious and pejorative language to accuse me of thundering and provocation in my review of Richard J. Lane’s Fifty Key Literary Theorists (March 2007). Carmody portrays me as self-satisfied in the same breath as he refers to his own wryness. He advises me to use words more ‘clearly and carefully’, and then composes a sentence in which ‘eliding’ creates a ‘mélange’. He charges me with portentousness in a letter that consists almost entirely of windy rhetorical questions. I have only one question: what is his point?

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While I make no question of Mr Davies’ sincerity in taking action, I am firmly of the opinion that nothing in either play could damage him (even if, as I strongly question, it could be taken to refer to him) in the eyes of any reasonable person. At the same time, the law concerning literary defamation is so unsatisfactory in its application to creative fiction (as opposed to purported factual reporting) that there was strong sympathetic support for the idea of a test case. ... (read more)