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An interdisciplinary seminar series - all welcome
Removing the Boundaries is
hosted by the School of English, Journalism and European Languages.
Seminars take place on Friday afternoons at 4pm,
in Rm 555 of the Humanities building.
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Programme for 2008 (follow the hyperlinks to read abstracts of the papers) |
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Semester 1, 2008 programme
March 7
March 28
April 11
May 2
May 16
May 30
Anica Boulanger-Mashberg "Searching for the Text: Reading the Authorial Marginalia of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River"
Dominic Lennard "Model Behaviour: Child’s Play and the 1980s Kid Consumer"
If you wish receive email notification of upcoming seminars please email SEJEL.admin@utas.edu.au and let us know.
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Semester 1 Abstracts
“Australian Memoirist, British Novelist, Canadian Filmmaker: Graham McInnes, Crossing Borders”
Prof Gene Walz, University of Manitoba
If Australians know Graham McInnes at all, it's because of his four memoirs, written in the 1960s, about growing up in Australia and venturing into the wider world. (All four books are in the University of Tasmania library -- with three copies available of the bestselling first one The Road to Gundagai.) They may also know that he was a novelist (though his two well-received novels are not here). Tasmanians may not know of his connections to Hobart nor of the wider reach of his career. This talk will underline McInnes's connections to Hobart and, based on my research on a fifth memoir (until recently buried in a Canadian archive), will indicate what a unique and remarkable career he had.
"Art and Materiality"
Prof Jeff Malpas, School of Philosophy
This paper will explore the role of the material character of the artwork in the working of art. Some comparisons will be drawn with the operation of linguistic metaphor (in particular the Davidsonian analysis of metaphor). A key idea will be the way in which the focus on materiality also implies attentiveness to the character of the artwork in its particularity and so also its placed character.
From Monash to Meyer: German Anzacs and the First World War"
Dr John F Williams, Hon. Research Assoc, Dept of Germanic Studies, University of Sydney
The Germans were the fourth largest immigrant group in Australia during the 19th and early-20th centuries, being ahead of the Welsh numerically but behind the Irish. They were welcomed and much prized in the Australian colonies as hard-working, peace-loving contributors to the economic and cultural life.
This changed after 1914. While stories of internment are wildly exaggerated, members of the local German communities were often subjected to petty victimization and with threats of ‘internment’ hanging over them, believed their British patriotism could be demonstrated by having a son ‘at the front’.
Many German Australians, from John Monash down, were genuine Empire loyalists and enlisted out of a sense of duty. Loyalties were confused; some families split over the issue of sons fighting for an Empire that seemed set on destroying their ancestral fatherland. In a few, these splits exist to this day.
"The Gendering of Pastoral Care in the High Middle Ages: Case Studies from Cistercian Monasticism"
Dr Elizabeth Freeman, School of History and Classics, UTAS
The Cistercian monastic order was one of the biggest institutional success stories of the Middle Ages. From its French origins in 1098AD in the forests near Dijon, this religious order spread like wildfire throughout Europe, catching the twelfth century's wave of interest in returning to the simple life. The big names of this religious reform were men - so let us ask "how, then, did women participate in Cistercian religious life?" What was early Cistercian history (12th and 13th centuries) like for nuns? Traditional scholarship has it that the Cistercian order was antagonistic to female members, and that the process of institutionalisation worked to exclude women from full participation in this new religious order. Was this the case and, if so, what were the consequences? This paper will try to uncover instances where male and female Cistercians interacted, in order to counter the prevailing idea that the two groups had little to do with each other. We will see that writing was one area of connection, with monks often writing spiritual guides for nearby nuns. Case studies from Germany and England in the thirteenth century will indicate the power of literary communities to thrive even when institutional communities are weaker.
"Perhaps the inner walls are more impenetrable: science and the arts are closer"
Prof Pat Quilty, School of Earth Sciences, UTAS
Boundaries exist because someone wants them and they reflect the search for difference or separateness. Some are dotted lines and others a solid line; many are highly exaggerated. In many areas, the time has come for society to seek similarities rather than differences and thus remove the perception of some of these boundaries.
As a non-expert in this field, I intend to discuss the origins of some apparent boundaries, show that, while seen as impenetrable, they are really not very great, but also, in contrast, that there are great boundaries where none are expected (with examples).
Depending on time, I may give an example of the role of a scientist as historian - crossing the science/art boundary.
Graduate Research Panel, School of English, Journalism, and European Languages, UTAS
Anica Boulanger-Mashberg "Searching for the Text: Reading the Authorial Marginalia of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River"
The textual margins of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River extend beyond the material boundaries of the book, and in these abstract margins Grenville pencils extensive marginalia for her own novel. The most prominent site for this marginalia is her companion text, Searching for the Secret River. Searching is a public epitext for The Secret River: a space allowing Grenville to mediate her novel in a more self-conscious manner than the novel itself might allow. Where other authors choose to impart a metafictive commentary within their novels, Grenville quarantines her first-person perspective to the margins, sidestepping the challenges of historiographic metafiction yet at the same time creating a dangerous fissure between the two texts. Despite this danger, the physical division of commentary from text serves to highlight the intrinsic and mutually dependent relationship between narrative and marginalia. In Grenville’s writing, physical artefacts as well as themes traverse the liminal space between text and epitext, as they contest the right to primary textual representation. Grenville’s marginalia in Searching at times enlightens and at times complicates a reading of The Secret River, as the commentary struggles to address and annotate the text.
Dominic Lennard "Model Behaviour: Child’s Play and the 1980s Kid Consumer"
This paper considers the popular horror film Child’s Play (1988), in which a hi-tech children’s doll is possessed by the spirit of a murderer, in connection with a rise in marketing to children during the 1980s. It argues that financial pressure placed on parents to purchase the latest consumer products means the film represents children’s emotional longings as a threat to adult power. In light of the momentous violence directed toward the child’s doll in the film, this paper also emphasises Child’s Play’s willingness to visually confuse the doll with its child-owner. It argues that the doll is presented as an apparently acceptable surrogate for the expression of adult frustration toward the figure of the child itself.
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