Self-criticism

'I had a sadomasochistic fascination with English': a vivid, playful debut disrupts clichés of docile Asian womanhood

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, August 2, 2023
Self-criticism, Heart, Uncertainty, Hamish Hamilton, Failure, Narration, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Parent, Clementine, Come, Disgust, Bell jar, Girl, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, The Bell Jar, Head, Human, Attention, Bontoc Eulogy, Language, Movement, Shame, Portrait, Malaysia Airlines, MAS370, Identity, Time, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Love, Child, Reading, Personhood, Pleasure, Growth, Queer, Commonwealth, Excoriation disorder, Parochialism, Memory, Female, Can't Stop Won't Stop, Book, Creative industries, Risk management, Baggage, Entertainment, Toy, Eulogy, Travel

Mercifully, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel, But The Girl, is effervescent on the page.

Key Points: 
  • Mercifully, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut novel, But The Girl, is effervescent on the page.
  • As the narrator says,
    I had a sadomasochistic fascination with English: it hurt me, and it gave me acute pleasure.
  • I had a sadomasochistic fascination with English: it hurt me, and it gave me acute pleasure.

Telling it slant

    • This self-awareness of movement against expectations infuses the book’s unapologetic over-sharing through the chatty, first-person narration with a sense of doubt and uncertainty.
    • It’s a refreshing commitment to self-critique and a refusal of foreclosure.
    • Read more:
      In Daisy & Woolf, Michelle Cahill revisits a modernist classic to write a story of her own

Homage to Sylvia Plath

    • This theme of tribute, disappointment, critique and conversation – of holding Plath close – continues as verse and refrain throughout the novel.
    • For instance, Clementine, a fellow artist in residence in Scotland, attempts to paint a portrait of the narrator over a portrait of Plath.
    • This probing of Plath’s work continues, as the narrator retrospectively charts her growth towards a less hagiographic and more open-eyed apprehension of Plath.
    • Read more:
      Sylvia Plath's famous collection Ariel is far darker than she envisaged

Cultural cringe and unstable ‘home’

    • There are the expected responses of shame and cultural cringe at Australia’s provincialism.
    • But they are complicated by the unstable category of “home”, where “home” is not just Australia, but also Malaysia.
    • Sometimes I wished my parents had immigrated somewhere else; being a child of immigrants always made your birth country feel so random and unnecessary.
    • This particular positioning of the self also plays out in the way the female Asian body is perceived and possessed.
    • Read more:
      André Dao's brilliant debut novel explores his grandfather's ten-year detention without trial by the Vietnamese government

A love letter

    • This novel is also ultimately a love letter, especially to the narrator’s formidable Ah Ma, a former maid, now “a matriarch demanding the best of the best for her and for her alone”.
    • It is also a love letter to the narrator’s parents, Ma and Ikanyu – an exploration of all that is inherited, all that is suffered and all that is owed.
    • “To hit you is to love you,” the narrator is told after being smacked by her father when she calls her mother “a grouch”.

Bad art friends – Jen Craig may be the best Australian writer you've never heard of

Retrieved on: 
Wednesday, June 21, 2023
Self-criticism, Review, Stella, Failure, Interview, Argyreia nervosa, Exhibition, Life, Friends, Internet, Fiction, Aborigine, Shadow Puncher, History, Doctor of Philosophy, David Musgrave, Creative, Catharsis, Museum, Penrith Museum of Fire, Illusion, Radio, Trauma, Death, Library, Family, Book, Valhalla, Skin, By the Great Horn Spoon!, Interior design, Publishing, Facebook, Panther, Fire, Western Sydney University, Accident

Review: Wall – Jen Craig (Puncher & Wattmann) Wall is the third short novel Craig has published over the past 13 years.

Key Points: 
  • Review: Wall – Jen Craig (Puncher & Wattmann) Wall is the third short novel Craig has published over the past 13 years.
  • I only managed to get a copy when her agent Martin Shaw noted on Twitter that Craig herself would individually mail copies to interested readers.
  • Craig even managed to secure an interview on Michael Silverblat’s KCRW radio show Bookworm – the on-air Valhalla of contemporary experimental novelists.
  • Read more:
    In Bon and Lesley, Shaun Prescott has written an Australian horror story of uniquely local proportions

Whirling monologue

    • The unnamed narrator is an Australian artist,
      who moved to London in the late 1980s to escape her difficult, estranged family in Sydney.
    • Teun holds strongly critical views – at least, in the narrator’s account – of her family and old friends.
    • The plot is more complex than it seems at first, because virtually all of its major events occur in the background and are reported second-hand in the narrator’s anxiously whirling monologue.
    • She ultimately protests a public lecture by Lord, staging a “splattered body intervention”, which seems to be a decades-delayed response to the undergraduate happening.
    • Read more:
      Enraged, tragic and hopeful: Alexis Wright's new novel Praiseworthy explores Aboriginal sovereignty in the shadow of the anthropocene

Trans-generational effects

    • Craig’s exegetical writing on her own work is about anorexia, trauma, and trauma’s durational and trans-generational effects.
    • For these characters, past trauma lives in the present and can only be repeated and responded to.
    • This becomes clear when Eileen (yet another punning name) disappears and the narrator visits her family to track her down.
    • It also invokes material that recalls, but does not quite replicate, the key scenario of Since the Accident.

Critical Race Theory--AcademicInfluence.com Spotlights the Leaders in CRT, Equality, and Racial Issues

Retrieved on: 
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
Articles, Education, Human behavior, Philosophy of education, Educational psychology, Personal development, Learning, Critical theory, Criticism, Lifelong learning, Self-criticism, Self

They come from nations across the globe, including Malawi, France, Nigeria, Sweden, Russia, Cameroon, and the United States.

Key Points: 
  • They come from nations across the globe, including Malawi, France, Nigeria, Sweden, Russia, Cameroon, and the United States.
  • Why does influence in Critical Race Theory matter?
  • The individual human being can become a better person only if he or she can engage in self-critique or self-criticism.
  • AcademicInfluence.com is a part of the EducationAccess group, a family of sites dedicated to lifelong learning and personal growth.