This paper looks at multimodal poetry in the contemporary Australian literary landscape and explores the potential for works combining text and image to change or enhance meaning within, outside and between the margins of the text. Australian poets and artists Bella Li, Toby Fitch, Jean Kent, Pam Brown and Caren Florence, among others, combine the visual medium with text to introduce further depths of (mis)understanding and to open alternatives responses for the audience. This interdisciplinary style follows on from 'artists' books' of the 20th century, a form of multimodal publishing which dominated the burgeoning independent publishing sector outside of the visual (gallery) and textual (traditional book) mainstream.
The Block (2003–2004; 2010–) exemplifies Australia’s fixation on home renovation. Renovation programmes are a reality television sub-genre characterized by excess, artifice, and questions of property and possession – also key concerns of the Gothic. The Block’s renovations appear homely: the goal is to produce more comfortable, more stylish, more suitable homes. Following Sigmund Freud’s assertion that homeliness inevitably gives rise to the unhomely, I argue that renovation on The Block is an unhomely process in which the unprepossessing suburban houses under renovation become labyrinthine counterfeits of the Australian dream of home ownership, where contestants encounter spectres of bankruptcy and housing insecurity, and undergo endlessly repeated cycles of claustrophobia and crisis that return to haunt them even after the programme has ended.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.