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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 every fortnight on a Friday afternoon at 4pm,
in Rm 555 of the Humanities building.
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Programme for semester 2, 2005 (hyperlinks to summaries of papers) |
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15 Jul.: Postgraduate Panel
- Jane McGennisken - "'A little child shall lead them' - Reading Tasmanian and Victorian School Readers as encoded themes about national growth ."
- Catriona Ross "Prolonged symptoms of Cultural Anxiety: The Persistence of Narratives of Asian Invasion within Multicultural Australia."
20 Jul..:
25 Jul.:
5 Aug.:
- Guest speaker Ian Conrich "A Land of Make Believe: New Zealand's Middle-Earth and the Merchandising and Consumption of The Lord of the Rings."
19 Aug.:
9 Sept.:
- Danielle Wood "The True Daughter: a story."
23 Sept.:
7 Oct.:
- Ralph Crane and Anna Johnston "Flora Annie Steel and the Punjab."
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Programme for semester 1, 2005 (hyperlinks to summaries of delivered papers) |
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4 Mar.: Postgraduate Panel
18 Mar.:
21 Mar.:
- (Special Monday seminar): Guest Speaker Journalist Margaret Simons: 'Insiders and Outsiders: The Divide in Australian Society'
1 April:
- Jason Bainbridge, 'Vernacular Theory: Articulations of law and modernity on television'
15 April:
- Fiona Gregory, 'Mrs Patrick Campbell's 'Anti-Ophelia': Embodying Madness on the Late-Victorian Stage'
29 April:
13 May:
- Lisa Fletcher, "'Performatives and Narratives: A.S.Byatt's Possession"
27 May:
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Paper Summaries
Emma
Searle, "Emily Dickinson and the Art of Habitation"
This paper explores the space plan of the Dickinson Homestead and
Emily’s negotiation of the rooms that constituted her world
for many years. The issue of Emily’s seclusion has been addressed
and redressed since her contemporaries lived to spread the gossip,
however this paper is less concerned with why she lived as she did,
and more in how she lived - how she negotiated the rooms, hallways,
staircases and attics of her Main street home. Though the dark spaces,
dimmed rooms and doorways of the Homestead famously concealed her
body, Emily used other spaces within the household to develop and
disclose a subjectivity.
I am interested in the art of habitation, the successes and failures
of domestic space, and have positioned my research in terms of an
engagement with the culture and relationships that produced the household.
In particular, this paper explores Emily’s relationship with
her brother Austin and his wife Sue, who lived next door in the Evergreens,
and the complication of this arrangement by the arrival in Amherst
of Mabel Loomis Todd, the first editor of Emily’s poems after
her death, who had a seventeen-year affair with Austin and inhabited
a purpose-built cottage across the Dickinson meadow. In conclusion,
I have contrasted Mabel and Emily, suggesting that in many ways Mabel
was the woman Emily might have been if unconstrained by the walls
she lived in. Mabel did not inhabit her own domestic space surreptitiously
and secretly – she used it publicly and openly, her attitude
betraying a sense of boldness and perhaps naivety in the face of Amherst’s
and Sue’s disdain. In publishing the poems, Mabel arrested the
circulation of Emily’s words between the three houses and the
walls of the poet’s bedroom and launched them into the public
sphere, achieving what Emily couldn’t from within the Homestead.
Nicole
Anae, "Where are you Merle Oberon? 'Tasmanian' Actresses, Celebrity
and 'Tasmanian-ness'"
Hollywood mega-star Merle Oberon seemed
set to help redress Tasmania's flagging popular image during the 1930s
and 40s. While it did work for a time, it was quickly undone by biographer
Charles Higham's revelation that Oberon's publicists had falsely claimed
her origins as 'Hobart-born' - ostensibly to conceal her Indian pedigree.
But more damaging to 'Tasmanian-ness' was the reality that Oberon
was received as a 'local' celebrity in 1978: even after the subterfuge
was discovered.
Why many Tasmanians still accepted Oberon as 'local' when she clearly
was not is an interesting chapter in the State's quest for identity.
Filmmaker Marée Delofski claims that 'Tasmanians who still
care about Merle Oberon believe anybody supporting the Anglo-Indian
story is taking Merle away from them'. However, I would argue that
the key to understanding the meaning of Oberon's provenance as 'Tasmanian'
lies not on the 'Anglo-Indian story' but in the State's colonial past.
Rosemary
Yeoland, "Camille Mauclair and Critical Competence"
My talk dealt with some of the conflicts
the French author, Camille Mauclair (1872-1945) encountered as a music
critic. Mauclair was an eclectic writer whose works included poetry,
novels, biographies, essays, books on music, art and travel. He was
also a critic of literature, and art.
His aesthetics were shaped by Symbolist ideals and the philosophy
of the fusion of the arts expounded by the composer, Richard Wagner.
He wrote several works in the music area including a biography on
Schumann, a history of European music, and a collection of essays
titled The Religion of Music.
Mauclair established himself for a period of time as a music critic
in Paris despite having no formal musical training. His style was
both literary and philosophical, thus avoiding reference to music
structure. Problems arose when he discussed and praised the naturalist
operas composed by Alfred Bruneau. Mauclair’s ideas on this
composer were opposed by the musicologist, Louis Laloy.
Michael
Christie, "'The recession we had to have': Figures of illness
in Andrew McGahan's Praise and Paul Keating's discourse"
This paper explores connections between
two sets of metaphors operating in two distinct fields: the metaphors
of the ill and healthy body and the metaphors of the broken down and
new engine in Paul Keating's political discourse and Andrew McGahan's
novel, 'Praise'. In Keating's discourse the 13 years of economic reform
(economic rationalism) instituted by the Australian Federal Labor
government, is represented as a healing, surgery on a near-terminal
economic body coterminous with the installation of a new, powerful,
efficient and productive economic engine. However, Keating's utopian
narrative of health, development and productivity, is ruptured by
the recession of the early 1990s. This rupturing isn't registered
on his metaphors of the engine, but rather enters his metaphors of
the body, which begin to falter in terms of the utopian teleology
of the economic rationalist project towards increasing health,
development and energy: the return of illness in the economic body.
Andrew McGahan's 'Praise' (1992) can be read back into this period
of recession in Keating's discourse though the same metaphorics. The
primary characters in 'Praise' suffer atopic illnesses: asthma and
eczema. 'Praise''s sick bodies register the atopic effects of economic
rationalist reform: a deferral and displacement of the 'costs' of
economic reform, and in particular of recession, onto the hypersensitive,
onto the future, onto other places and times. Further, in contrast
to Keating's new, powerful economic engine, the old engine in 'Praise',
Gordon's 1970's Holden Kingswood, can be read as a return of the repressed
potentials of Keating's economic engine metaphors: theft, joyrides,
breakdown and the crash.
Bert Peeters, "The land of the tall poppy cutters. Tall poppies and egalitarianism in Australian discourse"
In Australian English, tall poppies are usually individuals who, on the basis of unwarranted self-adulation, itself a consequence of success, amasses fortune or fame, have become targets for criticism; or, less frequently, individuals who, overcome by success, amassed fortune or fame, and on the mistaken assumption that they are above the law, have engaged in unlawful behaviour, only to find that, eventually, the law catches up with them as well. They become the victims of a widespread tendency, known as the tall poppy syndrome , to scrutinize high achievers and cut down the tall poppies among them. Sometimes, especially in the world of science, the term tall poppy is also used to refer to outstanding scholars who deserve to be publicly acknowledged for their work. This paper looks at tall poppies and at the tall poppy syndrome in Australian discourse, and argues that the term tall poppy is a key word which, when studies closely in terms of its currency, its incidence in collocations, etc., reveals a great deal about the real nature of egalitarianism, one of Australia's most often named cultural values.
Chris Ackerley, "What's Watt: towards the definition of Samuel Beckett's 'text'"
Samuel Beckett's Watt is a text that evades definition. The history of its composition is complex, and helps explains why the novel, as first published (1953), was full of errors, many of which were perpetuated into later editions – notably, the American Grove Press edition (1959) and John Calder first British edition (1963). Each of these editions, while correcting some errors, introduced new ones. But in addition to the obvious errors, the publishing history of Watt reveals many authorial changes of mind. The consequence of these processes is that the "text" of Watt remains problematical. This paper explores the problems associated with these matters, and interrogates not only the editorial principles and practices necessary for a better edition of this flawed text, but also those implicit in other editing projects.
Robert Phiddian, "How much can you get away with? The constraints on political cartoonists"
Editorial cartoonists working for Australian newspapers agree that they enjoy remarkable freedom to express their views. Given that most of them (at least in recent decades) are left of centre, while their papers' editorial lines generally lie to the right of the spectrum, it is fair to say that they do have a recognised licence to mock that is not conditional on their parroting the views of their editors or proprietors. So, how has this freedom developed and what are the effective constraints – industrial, ethical, legal – on it?
Peter Hulme, "Deep Maps: Travelling on the Spot"
Like most non-fiction, travel writing has had comparatively little attention paid to its formal and rhetorical characteristics. Now that the study of travel writing is becoming an established part of the academic landscape, perhaps it's time to begin to map some of its strategies. Formal analysis has its uses and its limitations. However, there's been so little formal analysis of travel writing that some broad brush strokes should be possible. The focus here will be on the relationship between movement and place. Travel writing is hardly possible without the description of movement of some sort, but travel writing almost always wants to say something about the places the travel writer visits. Movement and place are always therefore in some tension. To stay and to get to know is not to move; to move too quickly is to risk superficial impressions. The best recent meditation on these issues is William Least-Heat Moon's PrairyErth , close attention to which will structure this paper.
Billy Badger, "Removing the Boundaries : Zoë Jenny's Der Ruf des Muschelhorns"
At the age of 23, Swiss-born Zoë Jenny achieved immediate cult pop star status with her highly acclaimed debut novel Das Blütenstaubzimmer [ The Pollen Room ] (1997). Jenny's subsequent publications, Der Ruf des Muschelhorns [ The Call of the Conch Shell ] (2000) and Ein schnelles Leben [ A Fast Life ] (2002), have continued to be well received by an extensive readership, but the same works have attracted a critical response ranging between subdued praise and outright dismissal as teenage trivia. Although critics have recognised the highly symbolic nature of Der Ruf des Muschelhorns, which draws on a number of Romantic motifs as well as elements of Greek mythology, the novel's central symbol has been ignored. The overwhelming prevalence of literal and symbolic thresholds in Jenny's short novel provides an interpretation of the contemporary human condition as well as mirroring recent developments in contemporary Swiss literature.
Nicola Goc, "Celebrity Mothers, Medea and the Media "
Mothers have been receiving bad press since that mythological ‘monstrous mother', Medea, killed her children. The “Cruel Mother” motif has been a recurrent representation in plays, ballads, poems and novels for centuries and continues to survive in the ‘monstrous mother' motif of contemporary media infanticide and child abuse discourses. The demonising of mothers has reached an apex in media discourses of recent years positioning mothers - Kathleen Folbigg, Lindy Chamberlain, Sally Clarke, Angela Cannings, Andrea Yates and Rosa Richards - as “Monstrous Mothers”. Why has contemporary press discourse returned with such vigour to the ‘monstrous mother' motif of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the narrativizing of infanticide and child abuse? Contemporary media discourse places the deviant mother within news texts as wicked and cruel, the antithesis of motherhood. Through the individualising of deviance within the ‘monstrous mother' paradigm the media audience, and society, is absolved of responsibility through the actions of the individual. But what effect does the media's continual inscription of ‘motherhood' as the dominant representation of adult women – from politicians to CEOs to sportswomen - have on the way motherhood is viewed by society today? While the sole sphere established as the appropriate place for women is one in which social discourses are depoliticised, where matters related to women's lives are conventionally off-limits as topics of public discussion and areas of political intervention (Fraser 1989), the ‘monstrous mother' motif allows infanticidal women to be categorised as an aberration, to be consigned to the episodic judicial news paradigm. Using contemporary media texts this paper will examine the role the media plays in creating the social space in which motherhood continues to be constrained within a patriarchal ideology where women as mothers continue to be categorised, idealised (as the ‘celebrity mum') and demonised, and where deviant mothers are understood as ‘monstrous'.
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