Writing and Society Research Centre

Creative Nation: Writers and Writing in the New Media Culture

Researchers: Associate Professor Anna Gibbs, Dr Maria Angel, Professor Joseph Tabbi

Associate Professor Anna Gibbs and Dr Maria Angel from the Writing and Society Research Centre, together with partner investigator Professor Joseph Tabbi from the University of Illinois, Chicago are studying the impact of the culture of new media on literary writing. This project is funded by the Australian Research Council through its Discovery Projects grants scheme.

The last two decades has seen an explosion of technologically driven change in modes of communication. We are now experiencing a massive shift from print based writing to electronic forms. Online writing environments are transforming older literary genres, reshaping narrative and poetic form, and changing forms of authorship and writing agency. Readers, too, are being reconfigured as both users and producers. The creative processes involved in new media art and writing are challenging older models of artistic production and generating new forms of art and writing made possible by new technologies. We currently occupy a special transitional space and time with regard to this process. Most readers and writers have experience of both print and electronic reading and writing contexts. The 'Creative Nation' archival project seeks to map this space of transition by uncovering and documenting the work of Australian writers of electronic literature, through the construction of an Annotated Directory of Australian work. On the basis of this Directory we want to trace the emergent transformation between print and online literary genres, and to understand how writers now working in electronic contexts experience this transformation, through a qualitative survey of writing practice – that is, a questionnaire to writers and follow up interviews with a selection of them.

Spanish America – a Literary Laboratory

Researcher: Dr Christopher Andrews

Dr Christopher Andrews, the esteemed translator of many of Roberto Bolaño's books and member of the Writing and Society Research Centre, is studying recent fiction by Spanish American writers and how their compositional procedures are related to their political, ethical and aesthetic values. This project is funded by the Australian Research Council through its Discovery Projects grants scheme.

‘Spanish American fiction was an important source of new ideas and techniques for world literature in the 1960s and 70s, explains Dr Andrews. ‘There are signs that Spanish America has again become a literature leader with international successes such as those of novelist Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives, By Night in Chile). In the last two decades Bolaño and novelists César Aira and Rodrigo Rey Rosa have developed inventive and original procedures for writing fiction. But what exactly are these procedures? And how have these ways of writing been influenced by these writers’ values? This project examines these questions and also looks at how these experiments in fiction have been significant and influential for literary writing globally.’