Our next ‘Markers of Authenticity’ seminar, on ‘Creative Authenticity: Originality and the Real’, is a co-sponsored event with the ‘World Literatures and Cultures’ research cluster at Macquarie University. It features papers by Drs Mio Bryce and Ilona Hongisto of Macquarie University, who will address the topic from different creative and cultural perspectives, followed by a discussion on the theme. The seminar will take place in the Level 5 seminar room (212) in the Australian Hearing Hub at Macquarie University on Thursday 26th of October, from 4.00–5.15 pm, with refreshments to follow the discussion.
‘Creative Authenticity: Originality and the Real’
Thursday October 26th, 4:00pm–6:00pm
Australian Hearing Hub, Level 5, Seminar Room 212
‘Witty rather than original: collaborative authenticity in classical Japanese poetry’
Dr Mio Bryce (Department of International Studies: Languages and Cultures)
Japanese traditional poetry, waka, poses questions to notions of authenticity in terms of originality and creativity. In the Heian period (794–1185), cultural codes and knowledge were shared, and a harmonious appropriation to each given situation was required. Suggestive, metaphorical, and aesthetically contextualised expressions were appreciated, rather than candid manifestations. Waka was a respected means of communication: yet like emails, it was not fully private. Therefore, another dimension was formulated within waka to convey the true meaning in a more subtle manner, utilising a number of rhetorical concepts and apparatuses. This means that the authenticity of waka lay not in creativity and originality from today’s point of view, but in witty, intertextual appropriation of images and sentiments based on a shared culture and literary tradition.
‘True fabulations: The act of creation in documentary cinema’
Dr Ilona Hongisto (Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies)
This paper reconsiders the truth claims of documentary cinema through the notion of fabulation. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s postulation of ‘the powers of the false’ and the genealogy of fabulation in Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought, the paper relocates the modus operandi of documentary cinema from truthful representations to acts of fabulation in reality. The notion of fabulation describes the work of documentary cinema as one that engages with ‘the false’ in order to produce relations that enrich and add to existing realities. As such, it moves away from established documentary discourse where truth claims are conditioned on replicating a priori realities and enabled by the documentary’s representative modalities. Fabulation locates truth as that which is created in the documentary, making true fabulations the creative acts with which the documentary enriches the real.
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