No sooner has Pinocchio learned to stand on newly-crafted legs, than he slips out the front door and runs away. He moves spontaneously, pre-reflectively. He stares, laughs and pokes his tongue out, he pulls hair, kicks, and runs away. He refuses to dwell in the master’s studio, preferring instead to wander in the university of…
Author: Matt Somerville
I am a PhD candidate in literature at the University of Southern Queensland, having completed a Master’s program in English Language and Literature at Masaryk University, Brno and a B.A. in Literature at Griffith University. My academic research gravitates to the phenomenology of movement, wandering, and intersubjectivity, which I explore at the intersection of vagabond narratives and Beckett’s seminally named pseudocouple structure.
Wandering in Tandem: or, How many people does it take to construct a self?
Wandering in Tandem: or, How many people does it take to construct a self? The metaphor of the road is writ large upon the discourse of everyday life — we speak of ‘life as a journey,’ the ‘path travelled’, the ‘passage of time,’ choices made at ‘the fork in the road,’ wandering ‘off the beaten…
Take a Hike: A Guidebook for Getting in and out of the Head
In the writer’s guidebook for getting in and out of the head—for overcoming writer’s block— there is a paradoxical complement between the oft proffered advice to “go for a walk” and the instruction to create your “personal writing space.” Walking as a meditative and philosophical practice was famously romanticized in the Enlightenment period by the…
Reshaping Life Through Laughter and Humor
When my mother was diagnosed with cancer, she faced the illness with a matter-of-fact stoicism. She scoffed at the “terminal” diagnosis, as Simone de Beauvoir might prescribe, vanquishing the dangerous potency of the word. Toward the end, her candid acceptance morphed into bullish humor, which she used to disable the emotional rollercoaster and to reassert…