Staff Details

Name:	Dr Dominique Hecq
	BA Hons Dip Ed MA PhD
Position:	Lecturer, Creative Writing
Area:	Creative Writing
Phone:	+61 3 83448387
Fax:	+61 3 93448462
Room:	A713
Email:	dhecq@unimelb.edu.au

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Christina Natsis

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Staff Profile - Dr Dominique Hecq

Dominique Hecq attended the University of Liège, Belgium, where she completed two degrees with First Class Honours in English: a Licence in Germanic Philology and an MA in Literary Translation. With the help of a La Trobe University Scholarship, she came to Australia to write a PhD on Exile in Australian Fiction.
Dominique has taught in a wide range of subjects in the areas of Literary Studies, Creative Writing and Psychoanalysis in Australia and overseas. It might therefore come as no surprise that her work crosses borders. Her writing explores notions of sexual, linguistic and cultural identification. It is often experimental. Her research aims at bridging the gap between creative writing and theory: it teases out links between creativity and the psychoanalytic teachings of Lacan whilst examining ethical and political questions underpinning intercultural, feminist, and postcolonial issues. Her published work includes one novel, three collections of stories two books of poems and two short plays, one book on Freud written collaboratively, as well as articles on psychoanalysis, writing and translation. A new book of poetry is due out later this year.

Couchgrass (Forthcoming)
Noisy Blood (Papyrus, 2004)
Good Grief (Papyrus, 2002)
The Book of Elsa (Papyrus, 2000)
Magic and Other Stories (Woorilla Books, 2000)
Mythfits: Four Uneasy Pieces (Penfolk, 1999)
The Gaze of Silence (SideWaLK Collective, 1999)
With Russell Grigg and Craig Smith, Feminine Sexuality: Freud and the Early Controversies (Other Press, 1999)

Research profile:

Dominique Hecq's research interests are at the intersection of creative writing, psychoanalysis and pedagogy as well as genre theory and ethics.

Her major project, 'Uncanny Encounters: on Writing, Madness and Anxiety' is the first study to examine the relationship between writing, anxiety and psychosis within a Lacanian framework which is accessible to lay readers and professionals. The project sets into motion an innovative engagement between the fields of psychoanalysis and creative writing which is both theoretical and clinical by integrating clinical vignettes, pedagogical anecdotes, and literary illustrations in the discussion. The aims of this project are: to examine the complex correlations between anxiety and the onset of psychosis in order to determine the ways in which writing can be used in the prevention or treatment of mental illness and, conversely, how an informed handling of anxiety may benefit pedagogical practices in creative writing workshops.

"Lacan and the Poets: for the Love of Writing" offers an intertextual reading of the work of Jacques Lacan on the subject of love and power as expounded in his seminars on desire, transference, ethics, the four discourses and feminine jouissance.
This study shows that for psychoanalysis the literary object is both over-determined and under-determined and seeks to situate the forms of such contradiction and to analyze what she has called 'the (im)possible power of psychoanalysis' elsewhere.
Whilst the essays focus on particular aspects of love, these also focus on particular ways of articulating love with power in the work of writers whose work contributed to conceptual innovations in psychoanalysis. These writers include James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, Georges Bataille, Andre Gide, Andre Breton and Marguerite Duras.

'Trials: Moral Panics from News Story to Fiction' is aimed at a wider audience. The project feeds into ongoing research in genre theory, and discursive practices as understood in psychoanalysis and politics.
It introduces the French concept of the fait divers in Australian critical discourse because it offers new insights into the construction of moral panics and into the media's role in this process and because it enables to suggest new strategies for reading and scrutinizing this phenomenon.
While having no direct translation in English, the genre does overlap with the news story proper not only in terms of narrative structure, but also reception, as prime product of a consumer society, witness the public's consumption of news items about the Cronulla riots, the trials of Schapelle Corby and Van Nguyen and the Falconio case, to take but a few recent examples.
The research so far shows that although the universality of the paradigm of the fait divers as constructed by the media owes something to its psychosocial and psychosexual underpinnings, it also owes much to its particular mode of propagation.
The project therefore focuses on the narrativity of the fait divers from news story to fiction in order to assess its aesthetic, ethical and cultural significance by unpacking the ways in which moral panics are constructed, maintained or deconstructed through varying modes of propagation (news story, biography, autobiography, 'faction', film and fiction).

CREATIVE WRITING:

Hush, a memoir of cot death (first draft near completion).

The Ear in the Heart, a novel (in process)