Communal and Collaborative Cultural Formations
"Collaboration, itself neutral, can mean many things''
Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk, p. 3.
Communal and Collaborative Cultural Formations is the title for a set of research initiatives linked by a common interest in questions of literary and artistic collaboration: the formation of collaborative subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and the ways in which communal and collaborative formations challenge traditional perceptions of the construction of the author and the artist. Understandings of literary and artistic collaboration are an increasingly important aspect of contemporary debates around gender and cultural production. Centre staff involved include: Sharon Bickle, Janine Burke, Maryanne Dever, Sally Newman, and Ann Vickery.
Artists and writers have often lived and worked in the company of like-minded companions - wives and husbands, lovers, siblings, or friends. Such complex inter-relationships have been at the centre of artistic production from the Romantic poets, to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, from Bloomsbury to Australia's own artists' retreat at Heide. Nevertheless, in literary criticism, art history, and biography, the individual artist-genius remains the entrenched focus of much traditional scholarship. Women artists in particular have frequently benefited from collaboration and suffered from its marginalized status, their contributions denied as they were relegated to the status of muse, amanuensis or even private audience; or the unconventionality of their partnership dismissed as "obscurely repellant."
The research projects that appear here seek to re-conceptualise understandings of the processes in which artists and writers engage collaboratively in both artistic and textual production. Among the questions considered are: How might we rethink the meanings of collaboration? What do collaborators, particularly female collaborators, derive from the process of collaboration? How does the collaborative work differ from one conceived by an individual in solitude? How do intimate or familial relationships translate into art? And how have such relationships shaped public understandings of particular instances of collaboration?
Individual projects here include:
- "Damnable" Aesthetes: The Correspondence of 'Michael Field' and Father John Gray. Researcher: Sharon Bickle
- Being Geniuses Together: Artist Couples, Communities and Collaborations Researcher: Janine Burke
- Marjorie Barnard's and Flora Eldershaw's Letters to Nettie Palmer 1930-1964: Complete Edition. Researcher: Maryanne Dever
- The Fowl and the Pussycat: Love Letters of Michael Field, 1875-1909. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). Researcher: Sharon Bickle
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