Much of the satisfaction and the challenge of Janet Frame’s body of writing is its sheer inventiveness. Her works appeal to intellect, heart and mind, ranging from evocations of intense psychological distress through to satire and the absurd.

In this presentation, it is the deeply feeling heart that will be my focus. I am particularly interested in that sense of incompleteness and inarticulate yearning for an “elsewhere” that can be gathered under the term of longing. Longing is an indeterminate feeling, suspended between what might be and what might have been, between something missing and something anticipated. As such, it provides an affective layering to one of the most pervasive themes of Frame’s writing, the perception of missed encounter.

Concentrating on Frame’s early work, my inquiry starts with the restless wind that blows searchingly through the childhood spaces of Owls Do Cry; moves to the partially articulated feelings of Frame’s other early fictional works; and may conclude with some wider speculations as to the purpose and place of feelings in literary modernism, as it was realised in the New Zealand context.

More generally, I hope that my talk serves as a reminder of one of the main reasons why we read literature: to feel more deeply, to wonder at the endless complexities of human experience, and to give pause and moment to the otherwise unspoken promptings of the heart.

About the speaker

Dr Jennifer Lawn is a graduate of the University of Otago and the University of British Columbia. She has published extensively on New Zealand literature, with particular interests in the work of Janet Frame, Kiwi gothic, and contemporary fiction.

She is a co-editor of Gothic NZ : The Darker Side of Kiwi Gothic (Otago UP) and author of Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984-2008: Market Fictions (Lexington Books).

Jennifer currently works in educational design at AUT University in Auckland.

Livestream

Livestream the Margaret Dalziel Lecture: The Art of Longing in Janet Frame’s Fiction