Cirrus@Austlit

'On the first of December 2022, the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) hosted a short conference at the University of Melbourne as part of the inaugural Congress for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Academics and postgraduates from across the country gathered to reflect on the value of literature and its various embodiments in their professional activities of research, teaching, governance, and public engagement. From the bar table benches at The Curtain on Lygon Street, the day was hailed a great success, and a similar event reprising the conference theme promised – or wassailed – for 2023. It is the intention of AUHE to convene a small annual conference exploring the challenges we face as literary studies academics seeking to realise the core tasks of humanities education and research. Plans will go ahead while there is human capital to sustain them, though hopes remain high that an annual AUHE short conference on the state of literary studies in Australia will soon be a fixture on the academic calendar. The 2023 conference, ‘The Future of Literary Studies’, will be held at the University of Sydney, with plans for the 2024 conference at the University of Western Australia underway. A commitment to publish papers from annual proceedings is a goal of the current conference committee (Anthony Uhlmann, Ann Vickery, and myself), though one that remains contingent, like the proceedings themselves, on the availability of key individuals. On behalf of the committee, I’d like to express my sincere gratitude to colleagues from across the country, whose peer review of submissions on a tight schedule made this year’s special issue possible. The collegial response to our call out was a further expression of the scholarly consensus regarding the urgent need to meet the decline of the humanities in Australia by professing the value of literature across the range of its social, political, pedagogical, and private benefits.' (Introduction)          

'In 2022 the new Labor government cancelled the ERA (Excellence in Research, Australia) round and instructed the ARC to find new ways of accounting for research excellence that are more cost effective than the peer-review model that had served in previous iterations of the ERA. To this end the ARC conducted a consultation process that recommended the ERA be discontinued. What is clear in this emerging new order is the imminence of a move from peer-review processes (which have been abandoned because of the cost burden placed on universities) to data-driven approaches ‘relevant to all disciplines.’ In this light of this it is essential that potential pitfalls with current data-driven systems currently operating in relation to and directly affecting research in the humanities be clearly brought into the light, so that errors that might negatively impact disciplines in the humanities might be avoided. This paper (part of which was sent to the ARC review as part of the AUHE submission), sets out to examine some of the flaws with current systems of accounting for the value of literary studies. The failings occur in two main ways. One of these is to do with the collection and propagation of what might objectively be qualified as ‘bad data’ as a way of representing these disciplines. This is seen in the major journal rankings and citation ranking systems that currently operate in the university sector. The other is to do with the collection and propagation of what might objectively be called ‘bad peer review’ as a way of representing humanities disciplines in international university ranking systems. Some suggestions are made concerning potentially less flawed systems of accounting.' (Publication abstract)

'What is the place of literary studies in the history of its own decline? In this paper, I will explore three issues: (1) the idioms in which theory emerged in literary studies in Australasia from the 1980s, (2) how that emergence has been historicised and how it is described today by those involved and (3) paradigms for conceiving of the value of literary studies beyond political equality or transgression for its own sake. To motivate these aims, the paper will think with the work of influential critic Simon During. His earliest publications, especially a 1983 reading of Frank Sargeson’s ‘The Hole that Jack Dug’, were central to launching theory in literary studies in New Zealand. Later, his The Cultural Studies Reader (1993) helped to transform the discipline in Australasia. As he notes, disciplinary changes were coeval with administrative shifts. (As Head of Department at Melbourne University in the 1990s, as he notes, he ‘spent a great deal of energy restructuring the department’, and set up a ‘media program, aimed primarily at overseas students, as well as creative writing and publishing and editing programs, all for commercial reasons’.) More recently, During has returned to an interest in F. R. Leavis (familiar from his student days). A recent essay promoted what he is calling a ‘left conservatism’. Underlying the larger intellectual trajectory of the period, I will suggest, is an attempt to address, albeit often in deflected ways, the vexed relationship between aesthetic judgement and political equality. These terms have further been shaped by background political shifts that have fundamentally changed the funding model and pedagogy in Australasian universities (although this will not be my focus). My paper will conclude by suggesting that there is now an opportunity to rearticulate what we understand the value of literary studies to be. This will not be in the first instance as a form of politics or ethics, but instead as a distinctive enterprise of judgement.' (Publication abstract)

'Despite recognition that the use of journal rankings in research assessment is problematic, they are implicitly or explicitly used by institutions to evaluate individual researchers. This essay reports on a study we undertook on behalf of the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) investigating research assessment policies within the field of English, and their impact on academics’ publishing strategies and careers. After an initial online questionnaire, we conducted follow-up interviews with twenty-seven Australian literary studies academics from a range of institutions and at varying academic levels. Given generally widespread scepticism about the role of journal rankings in measuring quality, we asked these academics how they think literary studies can and should be evaluated. What we discovered was a broad and rich range of responses to this challenging question, as well as various creative ways literary studies academics negotiate questions of value in relation to institutional priorities and modes of evaluation. This paper suggests that broadening conceptions of value may be an important strategic response to the current institutional context in Australia.' (Publication abstract) 

'In this paper, I report on the new capstone course for the English major at Western Sydney University. The course was delivered against the backdrop of the former federal government’s Job-ready Graduates package, which misrepresented the employment outcomes of humanities graduates, as well as their contributions to the economic, cultural and political health of the country. As the Morrison Government’s higher educational reforms inadvertently demonstrated, the value of literature is difficult to quantify, not least because literature turns the idea of use value on its head. In a political climate hostile to the teaching of university English, the reframing of literary study at university in terms of the value of literature presents pedagogical opportunities I discuss with reference to the choices and approaches adopted in LANG3094: The Value of Literature during the pandemic in 2020–2022.' (Introduction)          

'Considering literature’s value is a difficult task in that it asks one to quantify an aesthetic form that by its very nature thwarts measurement. This does not mean that literature is an ineffable phenomenon. The value of literature comes from its ability to foster a sense of communal belonging and provide a unique window into the lives of others. The imaginary worlds of novels in particular enable one to inhabit vast linguistic spheres that generate sensations beyond the everyday. Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus (1980) provides remarkable evidence of literature’s ability to conjure such worlds and experiences. Her technique of ‘prolepsis’ installs the future into the present in unpredictable ways, making The Transit of Venus a powerful example of how novels can transport readers beyond themselves and into imaginative spaces of deep reflection. This novel demands close analysis because it is a carefully crafted work of fiction that offers a rich, even painterly sense of the world. It is also a novel that at times adopts an aerial perspective that crosses both physical and disembodied realms – landscapes of the body and of the mind. As in life, the generosity of Hazzard’s writing is antithetical to naive or simplistic outcomes, as the subtlety of her prose invites both readerly speculation and contemplation. I argue that Hazzard’s novel is a deeply generous fiction that awakens in readers a profound sense of interiority as one is encouraged to ponder the many facets and dimensions of The Transit of Venus.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay examines practices of evaluation in the archive of the important journal Critique, founded by Georges Bataille in 1946. The journal was a key forum for the development of postwar philosophy and theory in France, and its archive provides a unique resource for the study of the processes of evaluation and judgement that shaped the field. Considering a variety of archival materials (including advertisements for the journal, issue covers, tables of contents, author piece rate lists, letters and private communications) alongside reviews published in the journal, we examine the institutional processes, editorial practices and thus the more-or-less implied values that organised the journal’s operations. We argue that Critique’s archive reveals a complex, socially diffuse image of value and that the field of forces in which a volume is produced is multidimensional, integrating criteria from a plurality of different fields. The act of evaluative judgement encompasses capital; the prioritisation and ordering of content; operations of recommendation, friendship and mentorship; concerns for political impact; house codes; and norms of engagement.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper presents the Sydney Review of Books, which I edited, as a case study in the intersecting conflicts about value in contemporary Australian literature. It is a patchy and highly partial account of negative feedback and complaints that I have received about the SRB, especially those that bear on the question of what criticism should do, a topic that is never far from the question of what literature is for. Some generic complaints that fall within the scope of this paper: the publication of negative reviews, the failure to publish enough negative reviews; the deliberate scuttling the sales of authors by way of negative reviews; infelicitous pairings of critics and books; writing that is too scholarly or theoretical, writing that is insufficiently scholarly; too many reviews of Australian books, not enough reviews of Australian books, the failure to review certain books; the publication of critical writing that is insufficiently analytical, critical writing that shirks evaluation; the capitulation to identity politics/cancel culture/political correctness, the failure to represent the diversity of Australian literary culture. A journal of criticism that did not field highly critical feedback would be a dull enterprise. What these complaints reveal is a set of conflicts between audiences and, dare I say, stakeholders, around the economic, social and aesthetic value of literature. I am sorry to say that it will all be anonymised – and that reflects the great breach between what Australian critics, writers and readers are willing to say in public about the value of literature, and what gets said in private channels. As ceaseless proclamations about the value of contemporary Australian literature bolster an increasingly hyperbolic public discourse about Australian literature, narratives of crisis and decline circulate in the backchannels.' (Publication abstract)

'What are the values that define the profession of university English Studies in Australia, and how do those values align with what we may identify as the values of literature? And what values should a professional association of ‘English’ academics prioritise when speaking on behalf of its members and their discipline(s)? In 2021 and 2022, the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) instigated a project to revise its mission statement and draft a statement of values. The project came about as a response to a series of public pronouncements by past and present academics, politicians and journalists about the nature of the discipline of English, on a range of matters from the very name of the field, to its economic value as the subject of education, to its impact on students and the broader community. This essay reports on the project’s results to articulate the mission and value statements for AUHE. It also seeks to open up a series of questions about the nature and identity of our profession and its place within contemporary Australia.'( Publication abstract)

'The fifty years spanning the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth century saw literary studies established as an academic discipline within humanities divisions. These commonly also housed history, philosophy, classical and modern languages, and linguistics. The new discipline of English certainly engaged in fractious turf wars with each of these adjacent departments, but the idea of the humanities as literary studies’ natural home was rarely questioned.

'This paper ponders what insights and intellectual dispositions literary studies missed by being placed at institutional remove from the social sciences, also coalescing intellectually during this period. Literary studies’ humanities base predisposed it to valorise specific texts over their common print medium; to focus on rarefied aesthetic evaluation rather than consider the economics of book production, distribution, and consumption; and to construct retrospective canons of emblematic works rather than to attend to contemporary literary developments. In foregrounding these in-built assumptions long naturalized by literary studies’ academic environment, this paper engages in speculative thinking, imagining disciplinary 'roads not taken'.

'Granted, literary sociology has long existed as a marginal activity within English departments, imported from French social history, spurred by Marxist literary criticism and, in particular, prompted by book history’s reconceptualisation of bibliography as ‘the sociology of texts’ (McKenzie). Yet there are still other models for blending humanities and social science approaches, specifically the disciplines of media, communication, and cultural studies. This newer, hybrid discipline has thrived for some decades at the borderlands of humanities and social sciences but literary studies has had surprisingly fitful and uneven traffic with it. The present era of digital humanities, in which traditionally humanistic disciplines are reconsidering their relationship to print culture and to each other, presents an optimal time to reassess how past institutional structures formed the mental horizon of English and – equally – how alternative settings might facilitate new intellectual schemas.' (Publication abstract)