Please join us for the next CuSPP Seminar in person (BPB W3.03) and online on Thursday, 21 March from 1-2pm. Please refer to the CuSPP email or email Wesley.Lim@anu.edu.au for the link.

This paper takes its starting point from Lisa Gorton’s poem titled ‘The Book of Revelations’, which responds to the 1952 Sidney Nolan photograph ‘Untitled (Cynthia Nolan with Parasol Mounted on Dead Horse)’. The poem focuses on the particular quality of the smile on Nolan’s face as she sits on the propped-up carcass, clutching her parasol and looking gamely ahead: “I think I know that smile / … / Ashamed of what they’ve asked. Accommodating.” Juxtaposed with this smile are the processes of observation and aversion required in Sidney Nolan as the architect of this scene: “The artist had trained his eye to open and look and shut and turn away.” In this juxtaposition, this poem helps to show the ekphrastic poem’s capacity for capturing the ethics and aesthetics of, in particular, the averted gaze: the gaze which, upon seeing, becomes in some way complicit in the observed act, and chooses to disavow this complicity by looking elsewhere. This poem is particularly pertinent to acts of aversion that generate those moral injuries that don’t have outward consequences. The horse is already dead: sitting on it can’t hurt it, but might it hurt us? In what way could the process of looking away from the unsavoury implications of this act create moral injury in the sitter, the photographer, and, indeed, in the viewer of the photograph? This paper forms part of a larger series of articles on ethics and ekphrasis in twentieth-century poetry, with a particular focus on the moral complications of witnessing. 

Bridget Vincent is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Her first book, Moral Authority in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. She writes on modern literature and ethics, and her specific research interests include: public apology in twentieth century writing; ekphrasis; the lyric essay; ecocriticism; and literary attention. She has published on modern poetry in the Modern Language Review, the Australian Humanities Review, Philosophy and Literature, Diogenes and the MLR Yearbook of English Studies. She was recently awarded an AIAS-COFUND II Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies. Prior to this, she received a British Academy Rising Star grant for a project on writing and attention, which considered the role of literature in the age of digital distraction and misinformation. Before coming to the ANU, she taught literary criticism at the universities of Nottingham and Cambridge.