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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, 2006 |
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28 Jul.:
- Dr Eva Meidl - "Rapid Hobart - A history of acculturation."
11 Aug .:
25 Aug.:
22 Sep.:
6 Oct.:
20 Oct (final seminar for 2006):
- Postgraduate panel:
Rebecca Dorgelo - "The 'Mr Devil' in the Details: Non-fiction representation of AO Neville from 1915 to 1947."
Tony Stagg - "Paper Chaser: Shameless Confessions of an Archive Tragic"
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Programme for semester 1, 2006 (hyperlinks to summaries of papers) |
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10 Mar.:
- Prof Lucy Frost - "Speaking in Tongues: Language and Law in the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1778-1834."
24 Mar..:
7 Apr.:
- Dr Jenna Mead - "Working Craftily: Stephen Knight and Australian Medieval Literary Studies."
21 Apr.:
- Dr Elle Leane -
"The Land that Time Forgot: Fictions of Antarctic Temporality."
12 May:
- Dr Lisa Fletcher - "'His paintings don't tell stories...': Historical Romance and Vermeer."
19 May:
- Dr Bert Peeters - "The weekend in Australian discourse, or 'On Monday, I've got Friday on my mind...'"
2 Jun.:
- Graduate research panel
Jacob Fischer: "An Australian Multitude"
Sarah Gillman: "15 Minutes of Pain. Victims as Media Celebrities : A Theoretical Perspective"
Eleni Pavlides: "Multiculturalism Today: Contexts, Texts and Writing Practice"
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Paper Summaries
Dr Nenagh Kemp -
"Spelling roolz: An intervention study to improve University students' use of spelling strategies"
School teachers, university lecturers, and employers complain that young people today just cannot spell. It's not clear whether we can blame poor teaching techniques, a lack of reading, the advent of text-messaging, or a reliance on computer-based spell-checkers, but many people seem to agree that spelling just isn't what it used to be.
But with an orthographic system like English, who can blame poor spellers? The system is basically alphabetic, but has regularities at other levels as well, including the level of grammar. It is grammar that determines the final letters of tax versus tacks; adolescents versus adolescence, but these rules are rarely taught. Even highly literate university students make frequent errors on these and other grammatically determined spelling patterns, such as the difference between its and it's or there and their . This talk will describe a spelling intervention study being conducted this year with UTas undergraduate Psychology students. Their spelling performance will be examined, before and after three short, game-like sessions in which they interact in small groups to learn more about parts of speech, grammatical rules, and how these can contribute to improvements in spelling. (Warning: Findings may cause distress to some viewers.)
Dr Craig Norris - "Lost in Scanlation: Trafficking Manga Culture on the Internet"
The internet has played a crucial role in the global spread of manga (Japanese comic books) through image archives, club homepages, forums, and online shopping. The online dissemination of manga images has increased its international profile, and its export has become an important part of Japan 's overseas trade. However, manga has also become widely dispersed through piracy and copyright infringement through peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as BitTorrent . The internet has become a key location in the ‘trafficking' of manga today, particularly the fan-produced manga ‘scanlations' – meaning manga that has been scanned and translated from Japanese. These are often distributed for free through various internet websites via FTP and P2P applications. While the legal issues surrounding these scanlations are significant and a major issue for the ownership of cultural goods, this article will focus on the production and reception of these scanlations and the collaboration between Japanese and English speaking manga fans. I will consider two key questions: firstly, what types of ‘vehicles' form this manga traffic; and secondly, what impact have these websites had on the current status and knowledge of manga culture outside of Japan . I will discuss these two issues through a case study of the Lost in Scanlation website run by members of Monash University 's Manga Library. This website attempts to raise the profile of its manga collection and help its participants work collaboratively with amateur manga artists in Japan to scanlate their work and contextualise it for a non-Japanese audience. The scanlation team use various freely available online applications such as wiki, blogg, image storage, and php open source programming language to produce and archive a range of content related to manga and Japan . In addition to these software ‘vehicles' I will explore how the manga form itself provides a malleable space within which content can be organised so that particular readings and identifications can occur. I argue that the ‘packaging' of manga for global consumption in this web site acts as another type of vehicle to shift the content between the global and local. In this way Lost in Scanlation attempts to provide instant access to the global/local spaces of Japan , Australia and the imagined landscapes of manga. I show that the ease of global communication technologies allow for the simultaneous exchange of information and images across geographical and national boundaries, while manga's mu-kokuseki (nation less ) packaging allows content to be easily appropriated by, and remade, by any local community.
Dr Mitchell Rolls - "Travelling Home: Reading Walkabout (1934-1940) "
The notion is still recited as if axiomatic that settler-Australians are and always have been alienated from the land they inhabit. Better understanding of Australias history vis--vis Aborigines and Aboriginal activism associated with land rights and native title, amongst other proclamations of entitlement, have served to prolong if not exacerbate such anxieties. Yet there is much evidence pointing to the profound attachment to place that early and later settlers developed. Revisionist accounts revealing this love of the land and not a recoiling from it with wistful dreams of a homeland abroad are now appearing. A popular magazine Walkabout published from 1934 to 1974, did much to showcase this attachment to place. Whilst Walkabout always had an eye on its charter to promote Australia and travel within and to it, it demonstrated through the lives and activities depicted the profound sense of belonging that many settlers and even recent immigrants developed. This is portrayed through evocations of personal landscapes of work, industry, peoples enjoyment of the natural environment, and leisure activities. This paper will trace Australian lives as depicted in the first decade of Walkabout and demonstrate the multifarious ways in which settlers wove themselves inextricably into the landscape.
Dr Rose Gaby - "Shakespearean Worlds in Antipodean Space"
The post-war years marked the development of a new cultural confidence in Australia and a concomitant willingness to engage in local experiments in performance and the use of theatrical space. Several directors around the country became interested in the idea of producing Shakespeare in ways that approximated Elizabethan performance conditions. This included the notion of open-air performance: a move which had the by-product of dismantling some of the barriers that had hitherto separated Shakespeare from the geographical locale of performance. The pursuit of earlier modes of presentation may have been fuelled in some instances by a desire to recover some kind of authentic, essential ‘Shakespeare' experience, but did it, instead become a mode of localization in Australia? To what extent did Elizabethan performance entail exposure to a patently non-Shakespearean sense of location? This paper revisits some of the landmark Australian experiments in Elizabethan staging of Shakespeare of the 1950s and 60s with an eye on the encounters that took place between Shakespearean and Australian worlds. It considers mid-twentieth century Elizabethan experiments as exemplars and agents of a shift in the way Australians related to both Shakespeare and Australian space.
Claire Knowles - "Sensibility gone mad: or, Drusilla, Buffy and the (d)evolution of the heroine of sensibility."
One of the things that is most often forgotten in discussions of “post-feminism” is the continuity implied between it and other discourses of what we might broadly term “feminism.” Just as “post-modernism” implies continuity even as it claims to break with the discourse of “modernism,” post-feminism affirms its links with, even as it tries to distance itself from, a wider tradition of feminist thought. With this in mind, this paper will examine some of the ways in which the post-modern and post-feminist text of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTVS) enters actively into a dialogue with earlier discourses of female empowerment. In particular, it will argue that BTVS engages with a late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century tradition of feminine gothic fiction, perhaps best exemplified in the work of novelist Ann Radcliffe.
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