Presented in person and online via Zoom, login details below.

This practice-led thesis draws upon the works of Gerald Murnane and Alexis Wright to approach tricky questions about writing memory and place in contemporary Australia. The poetic theories of Bachelard and Glissant are used to understand how these authors engage with notions of contingent memory and material reality through the formal structures of written fiction. I approach this structural element through the metaphor of architecture, which has long been invoked in historical understandings of memory and fiction. I find this architectural lens useful in developing an idea of how inherited structural elements both encourage and preclude certain ways of experiencing the past. Taking this implied positionality seriously is generative for a treatment of memory which incorporates opacity as well as transparency. Drawing from a series of interviews with past inhabitants of one of Canberra’s longstanding share houses, the creative component of my thesis seeks to fictionalise a poorly documented artistic and cultural scene in Canberra. Through the medium of fiction, I hope to approach a part of Canberra’s history characterised by its lack of visibility which has taken place primarily in houses that are now in the process of redevelopment.

Speaker:
Marcel is currently studying his PhD at ANU in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics. He also has an undergraduate degree from ANU in Physics and English with honours in English.

Zoom link:https://anu.zoom.us/j/85735225344?pwd=r1i9piBMcDoSaLW6ust64Y1aEUAtpz.1