Kevin and I ride to St Albans

RESEARCH BACKGROUND Kevin rides to St Albans draws upon the tradition of the self-reflexive personal essay since Montaigne to ask: how do operations of artistic influence and forgetting play out together in the context of contemporary nonfiction writing? Questions of mimesis, imitation and artistic influence have been discussed, with regard to Western literature, since Plato and Aristotle. More recently these have been addressed through psychoanalytic and poststructuralist readings and concepts such as intertextuality. At the same time, in the developing field of memory studies, we find an array of analyses of the cultural and psychic constructs of memory and forgetting. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION This essay addresses these concerns from a writerly perspective, and moreover within the particular issues of explicitly subjective nonfiction writing: issues such as the relation between narrative apprehension, witnessing, control and perspective. Notions of 'authentic' and 'original' experience are placed in question. The essay attempts to formally, playfully stage the intertextual drama it discusses, within the metaphor of the labyrinthine journey, and with reference to the mythic figure of the blinded Oedipus. RESESARCH SIGNIFICANCE The essay discusses the connection between two previously published essays, the first by a well-known Australian writer/scholar in a leading international literary journal and the latter (by the author) in a widely circulated Australian literary magazine.