Life Narrative Studies
Seminar
Life narrative studies is a broad term used to reflect the interrogation and analysis of practices of self-representation. Such practices include textual (life writing, memoir, auto/biography, diary), digital (websites, blogs, social media), material (visual art, quilting), and performative…
Disinterestedness in Australian independent publishing: parties, coolness, and capital
Lecture/seminar
Small presses occupy a distinctive position within the publishing ecosystem, often associated with high-quality literary books and an apparent indifference to immediate financial profit. Pierre Bourdieu’s account of cultural production supports this conception by placing such publishers at the…
Criminality and Femininity: Undoing the Paradox
Lecture/seminar
Women involved in violent crime, both perpetrators and victims, are often vulnerable to forms of representation that distort or overwrite their experiences. Their identities can be reduced to sexist stereotypes, while their bodies are displaced, manipulated and represented in ways that reinforce…
Springtime, with Fences: Ruth Park’s Teenage Years and the Emergence of a Writer (1930–1937)
Seminar
Online via Zoom, please contact Monique Rooney for the link.“The Three Wise Men of Gotham loved the springtime so greatly they could not bear to see it vanish. So they built a fence around the cuckoo.” (A Fence Around the Cuckoo, 1992)With this epigraph, Ruth Park opens the first volume of her two…
Snakes
Seminar
Online via Zoom, please contact Monique Rooney for the link.In May 1770, Joseph Banks described sea snakes near the coast of ‘New South Wales’ as ‘beautifully spotted’. In 1788, Watkin Tench noted the ‘[l]arge snakes beautifully variegated’ around Botany Bay and Port Jackson. The one snake…
Notes towards an Unhomely Australia
Seminar
Online via Zoom, please contact Monique Rooney for the link.This paper introduces a book I’m planning, a sort of belated ‘sequel’ to the much earlier co-authored Uncanny Australia (1998). My focus is on the so-called 'housing' crisis and I shall argue that even as Australia imagines itself as a…
The Shadow and the Acolyte: On the Origins of Creative Writing in Australia
Seminar
Late in 1959, an up-and-coming novelist named Thea Astley knocked on the door of Dogwoods, Castle Hill. Her knock was answered by Manoly Lascaris, the lover and lifelong partner of Patrick White, who turned her away. Patrick was already seated at his desk. He would brook no interruption. Irked yet…