Journals

A sense of suburban ugliness, occasionally undercut with twists of magic realism, runs through the latest issue of Offset, Victoria University’s creative arts journal. Like its contemporaries Above Water, Verandah, Verge, and Visible Ink, Offset is a student-run publication – a new editorial team is selected each year – and provides a vital space for both emerging editors and artists to trade work and ideas. Produced by committee, there is a yearbook-like feel to this community-driven collection. Aesthetically, 2014’s incarnation is the strongest yet, beautifully designed by Chloe Watson, with an eye for storytelling and narrative simplicity, and featuring a whimsical cover illustration by Renee Cerncic.

‘A father is God to his son,’ declares the father in David Whish-Wilson’s story ‘The Cook’, just a split second before he is shot dead by his drug-dealing son. Thus begins this special edition of Westerly, which marks not only the magazine’s sixtieth year of publication but also the retirement of its two standing editors, Delys Bird and Tony Hughes-d’Aeth.

In 2013, publisher Sigrid Rausing significantly reduced Granta magazine’s staff, and long-time editor John Freeman resigned. At this news, various high-profile contributors, including Peter Carey, expressed their concern for the future of the magazine. But if we can judge solely on the quality of this edition, the new Rausing-edited Granta has lost none of its verve. It remains chock-full of fine writing and art.

With fate as its theme, much of the work in this edition speaks to love, loss, and mortality. Which is not to say that it makes for grim reading. The lead story, Louise Erdrich’s ‘Domain’, may be dark in subject matter, but it is also playful. A take on a no doubt popular science fiction theme, ‘Domain’ presents a future world in which the quality of your digitally uploaded afterlife is determined by which of the various corporate-owned simulations you can afford. It is literary in tone without sacrificing the pay-off of genre.

Guy Rundle ends his engrossing account of Clive Palmer with a disclaimer: ‘Knowing Clive, he will contradict everything asserted in this essay in the two weeks between its going to press and hitting the bookstands.’ Since the publication of this essay, Palmer has not contradicted the assertions of the essay, but his party has been challenged. Senator Jacqui Lambie has resigned from the Palmer United Party. At the November Victorian election, preference deals led to the election of micro parties to the Upper House, without a Palmer United Party member.

Axon’s commitment to publishing new research in creativity and the creative process is highlighted in this issue on poetry. Lucy Dougan, consultant editor, introduces its exploration of ‘how poetry constitutes knowledge; how it is made; how poets think about their work’, and one of the exhaustive questions in the academy: ‘how poetry may be understood as research.’ Like Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, Axon’s open access enhances ‘the free exchange of ideas’. Since many of the same writers have been published in both journals, Axon reads like a more techno-savvy sister publication.

Voices of the dispossessed appropriate the narratives in the current issue of Westerly. The fiction in this issue is the strongest section, largely due to the originality and diversity of the writing. M.T. O’Byrne’s magic-realist short story, ‘The Day Before Christmas Island’, introduces the voice of the refugee. Reminiscent of Life of Pi (2001), the narrator and Thommo ‘pull a boy from the sea’, only to find that his siblings, at the end of a long fishing line, appear in the form of a shark and a whale and want to board their boat. Zdravka Evtimova’s ‘Happiness is a Simple Thing’ presents the retribution of the Oshav men who want ‘blood for blood’, while Shokoofeh Azar’s ‘The Woman Who Went to Stand There’ – translated from Persian – is the devastating story of a woman who waits a lifetime at the Somayyeh intersection to elope with her lover. Like Miss Havisham, her demise is charted in her decaying appearance. Finally, Mark O’Flynn’s ‘Turning the Other Cheek’ is a standout for its almost Nabokovian unreliable narration of a father who terrorises his murdering son.

This is a thoughtful and timely issue of Australian Literary Studies (ALS), one of Australia’s most substantial scholarly journals. It brings together scholars from institutions across Australia, India, and New Zealand to reflect on the state of the discipline of English in the context of a number of recent upheavals, including those directly relating to print media, including literature, which many would consider the traditional focus and matter of English. It also includes shifts in cultural literacy in the Internet age: changes in the nature of reading and the places and ways readers read; changes in school curricula; changes in the higher education sector – in response partly to changes in literacy and school education and to a rise in vocational training at both levels; to the rise of the corporate university; and to developments over the past several decades that we might think of as internal to the discipline: the critiques of syllabi and reading practices focused on canonical texts; the rise of theory; of post-colonial and feminist and minority discourse approaches; of interdisciplinary reading, and so on. The contributors to this volume address these questions in terms of debates around ‘the public humanities’: that is, defences of the traditional humanities by scholars from literary studies along with philosophers and historians in the face of attacks from the political and corporate world about the ‘relevance’ of these fields of inquiry.