Author: Amanda Williams
Williams, Amanda, 2021 All in the same boat: heterotopian transformations and metamodern reverberations in Antipodean fictions of travel, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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Using metamodernism as a methodology of simultaneously looking back, being in the present, and looking forward, and heterotopic thinking as a methodology that enables this temporal travel, my exegesis focuses on readings of particular Antipodean women’s fictions of travel: Christina Stead’s For Love Alone, and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel and The Life to Come, and endeavours to track how these texts illuminate specific elements of modernist, postmodernist, and metamodernist structures of feeling. I argue that a twenty-first century structure of feeling encompasses a response to an intensifying singularity of ‘otherness’ which can, paradoxically, open up the possibility for subjective transformation. Through my exegesis and creative project, a novel entitled The Heartbeats Echo, I endeavour to reflect a temporal and spatial echoing and reverberation between my writing and research to track the ways in which heterotopias and heterotopic thinking allow for authentic subjective transformation through the paradigm of metamodernism.
Keywords: metamodernism, heterotopia, travel, structure of feeling, authenticity, Australian women’s fiction
Subject: Creative Arts thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2021
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Dr Amy Matthews