Writing Sex and Gender
Seminar
In the era of #MeToo and the same sex marriage plebiscite, how has writing on gender, sex, and sexual orientation changed? How do sexism and racism interact, and what are their effects on emerging and established writers from different communities? What can contemporary writers do to address…
Moving Women: The Touring Actress as Vector of Political Change
Seminar
In 1869, one year before the first women’s suffrage bill was presented in the British parliament, John Stuart Mill published his treatise on the subjection of women. One of the lynch-pins of his argument for an end to the legal subordination of women is work. In it he recommends that ‘the present…
Tania Evans ‘Cripples and Bastards and Broken Things’:Negotiating Masculinity through Fantasy Genre Conventions in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones
Seminar
Hegemonic models of masculinity that are based upon violence, domination, and invulnerability are recognised by scholars as damaging for the individuals who enact them as well as the societies in which they are situated. In both the ‘real’ world and the cultural texts that reflect and shape it,…
Unexpected Intimacy: William Forsythe’s Alignigung (2016) and German Integration
Seminar
William Forsythe continues to embark on new aesthetic territory by exploring choreographic objects—not necessarily related to a body ‘but rather an alternative site for the understanding of potential instigation and organization of action to reside’. Exploring this concept, his screendance…
Unconscious Self‐Appraisals in Literary Works
Seminar
Ezra Pound struck a pencil through the lines in The Waste Land manuscript that referred to thewriting of bad poetry. Similarly, his mentee Hemingway cut a description of poor novel‐writingfrom The Sun also Rises. In both cases, it was a character in the text (Fresca, Jake) who wasdescribed…
Gail Jones - The Death of Noah Glass
Other
Gail Jones’s mesmerising new novel tells a story about parents and children, and explores the overlapping patterns that life makes. In The Death of Noah Glass, art historian Noah Glass, having just returned from a trip to Sicily, is discovered floating face down in the swimming pool at his…
The Roman-fleuve and the Rebirth of the Author
Seminar
Loosely comparable to earlier multi-volume works such as Balzac’s Comédie humaine and Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, the roman-fleuve was one of the most prominent if short-lived literary trends in early twentieth-century France. These cyclical novels drew together a vast set of influences, from…