Abstract
This volume is refreshingly diverse and exploratory. It remembers Ross Chambers – who died in October 2017 – and his writing, by rising to the critical challenges he laid down, and by extending their field of force to new literary areas. Underlying this fruitful proliferation is a common concern: what literature, or the reading of literature, does to us and does with us. But what is striking is the strong sense of warm intellectual community among the contributors, which finds eloquent expression in the sharing of Chambers and his work. The volume is also as if visibly inhabited by Chambers, in haunting photographs of, and from, Blues Point Tower, Sydney, where Chambers once resided.
Anna Freadman provides the initial momentum by considering Chambers’ ‘life in books’, his restive intellect, his refusal to loosen his grip on texts. The same qualities characterized his dealings with his own discipline and these are taken up by Jarrod Hayes in his searching investigation of the French Cultural Studies debate between Chambers and Sandy Petrey, with its differential repercussions for American and Australian pedagogy; the protagonists, Hayes argues, shared more common critical ground (‘a queer embrace’) than one might have at first imagined. In his chapter entitled ‘The Ethics of Reading in the Double Negative’, Alistair Rolls hopes ‘to reread Christie (Hallowe’en Party (1969)) by hanging out with Ross Chambers (“Alter Ego: Intertextuality, Irony and the Politics of Reading’”)’ (p. 53), which he does, in an engagingly inventive, ‘deconstructive’ investigation of crime fiction’s underlying non-self-coincidence. Murray Pratt incorporates into his absorbing study of Ali Smith’s Autumn, Chambers’ interest in the reader as the essential agent, or motor, of literature’s capacity to animate and transform narrative through deferral and various kinds of relational mediation, particularly between art and life. Chambers’ account of Baudelaire’s handling of, and formal and generic adaptations to, the erosions of the urban entropic are addressed by Greg Hainge in relation to Speculative Realism’s conflicted approach to object-oriented ontology; he finds that much is to be learned from the poet, not least that ‘It is precisely this force of materiality that, counterintuitively perhaps, unanchors the world’ (p. 94). Joe Hardwick alerts us to Chambers’ seductiveness as a critic–storyteller, to his persona as homme fatal, in a study of François Ozon’s Dans la maison (2012), which examines how the film generates situational self-reflexivity through different kinds of mise en abyme.
An application of Chambers’ vision of the writing of melancholy and of the oppositional is persuasively proposed by Sophie Patrick in an examination of two of Michel Houellebecq’s novels (Les Particules élémentaires, 1998, and La Possibilité d’une île, 2005), with their patterns of ‘the dispersal of the self, the torpor and listlessness, and the sense of temporal break’ (p. 130), within frameworks of repetition and opposition. The oppositional is also an essential thread in the rich texture of the final essay, Valentina Gosetti’s reflections on translation and transloitering in relation to her own collaborative anthology, Donne: Poeti di Francia e oltre (2017), ‘in the age of advanced, decrepit, capitalism’ (p. 148). Gosetti also harnesses Michel de Certeau’s concept of the tactical in her championing of the meshwork of self-otherings and self-diversifying paths that the reader must engage with, a meshwork with important implications for pedagogy and academic writing.
And the bibliography, with which the volume closes, reminds us that, however indelible the presence of those we prize in the world of critical scholarship, the details of their bibliographical records are sometimes more vulnerable to the erosions of time than we would like.