Cirrus

The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Latest Issues

VIEW ALL ISSUES (16637657)

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'On 9 May 1933, the day before the Nazis burned her book as part of their action against books of ‘un-German spirit’, Helen Keller wrote an open letter to them, which was published on the front page of the New York Times. ’You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe,’ she said, ‘but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.’ Today, if Helen Keller is thought of at all, it’s as the blind and deaf girl who, through the efforts of her teacher, learned to communicate. There’s scant acknowledgement that she was even capable of having ideas, and she’s often reduced to nothing more than testament to the ideas of others. However, Keller not only spoke, but read and wrote four languages, and was a prolific poet and essayist. The ideas that led to the Nazis burning her book Out of the Dark were contained in the essay ‘Why I Became a Socialist’.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Appears in:

y Sydney Review of Books May 2019 16429401 2019 periodical issue 2019
(
2019
)
Appears in:

y Second City : Essays from Western Sydney Catriona Menzies-Pike (editor), Luke Carman (editor), Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 21162291 2021 anthology essay Abstract
'Second City is a showcase of the diverse literary talents that make Sydney’s Western Suburbs such a fertile region for writers.

'Beginning with Prime Minister’s Award-winning author Felicity Castagna’s warning about the dangers of cultural labelling, this collection of essays takes resistance against conformity and uncritical consensus as one of its central themes. From Aleesha Paz’s call to recognise the revolutionary act of public knitting to Frances An’s ‘counter-revolutionary’ attack on the repressive clichés of ‘women of colour’, Sheila Ngoc Pham on the importance of education in crossing social and ethnic boundaries, and May Ngo’s cosmopolitan take on the significance of the shopping mall, the collection offers complex and humane insights into the dynamic relationships between class, culture, family, and love. Eda Gunaydin’s ‘Second City’, from which this collection takes its title, is both a political autobiography and an elegy for a Parramatta that has been lost to gentrification and redevelopment. Zohra Aly and Raaza Jamshed confront the prejudices which oppose Muslim identity in the suburbs, the one in the building of a mosque, the other in the naming of her child. Rawah Arja writes in a comic vein on the complexity of the Lebanese-Australian family, Martin Reyes on the overlay of experiences as a hike in the Dharawal National Park recalls an earlier trek in Bangkong Kahoy Valley in the Phillipines. Finally, Yumna Kassab’s essay on Jorge Luis Borges reminds us that Western Sydney writing can be represented by no single form, opinion, style, poetics, or state of mind.

'The cultural backgrounds represented here include Cambodian, Pakistani, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Italian, Filipino, South American, Iraqi and Turkish.'

Source : publisher's blurb
Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021
(
2021
)